Francis Spufford and the inner life of belief

J. Otto, in my country, 22.3 per cent of people reported ‘no religion’ in the 2011 Census. This is not ‘very few’. Perhaps you should stick to specifics.

Outside of the very narrow world of intellectuals largely isolated from the real world…

Wait a minute, aren’t you one of those people? An ivory tower academic who’s been in and around schools all his life? Or do I have the wrong J. Otto Pohl?

Try living on TV-L-13 if you think an academic life is insulated from the real world. I make less than the assistant manager at the local hardware store and I shop at Aldi because I can’t afford to get groceries anywhere else.

On topic, I have a lot more respect for Spufford for writing about the USSR as something that failed for comprehensible reasons, despite the genuine belief of so many who worked to establish it. It is far too easy for religious people – and especially Christians – to construct Manaechian worldviews about the Soviet Union. Or maybe that’s just my Midwestern roots showing.

His point here resonates for me:

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

There is something very smarmy and self-assured about the New Atheism (a.k.a. Dawkins and his lot) that bugs the hell out of me. A failure to recognize that the social forces that support belief aren’t absent from the lives of unbelievers, and aren’t without effect either.

Would it be possible to specify what it means to “take religion seriously”? Because it seems to me that the New Atheists, whatever their faults and however much they might misunderstand religion, seem to me to take it very, very seriously as a force in the world.

As a second-generation atheist, brought up utterly without religion of any kind, I managed to get to my forties without prolonged exposure to religious people of any kind, until I joined a choir, which met at the local Anglcan church, and included some of the congregation. I discovered that people I respected for their politics, their musicianship and their commitment to social justice, also sincerely believed what to me was a self-evidently ludicrous bunch of folk tales. It was hard to come to terms with, and I’m not sure I ever have. In the end, it was an ‘agree-to-disagree’ situation, and none of them were the proselytizing type, so that worked. But it remains quite incomprehensible to me, which I am happy to accept is my own limitation. Real atheists do exist. We aren’t just pretending to vex the faithful.

Religion is not equal to Christianity, even in Europe. What it means to take Islam seriously is very different from taking Judaism seriously (and what Judaism?) Confucius is a very different lawgiver from Moshe.

The danger of religion is its private nature. An argument about virtue ethics carries much more weight for a Catholic then anyone else, while any exhortation against the death penalty on the basis of human fallibility rooted in halakhah is unlikely to be comprehensible by many. (This isn’t to say the arguments cannot be secularized, but rather that there are nonsecular arguments that are specific)

Public reason is atheistic because it is public: accesible to all, and inherently biased towards none.

I enjoyed this post.

One thing that sounds interesting about the book is the focus on theology, at least compared to other recent books on religion. It seems like Anglicans and some other Protestant groups think a whole lot more about theology than Jews or Catholics do (this has been my experience trying to talk about Protestant writers with Catholics, anyway). There’s a whole range of things that fall under the category of religion: ethics, theology, mysticism, psychology, social theories, etc., etc. American mid-20th century ecumenicism of the sort that you most often see (e.g. cited or in public libraries) tends to focus largely on ethics, responsibilities to other people and to society, as does Unitarian style (for example) multiculturalism–maybe also with the question where ethics comes from–so it might be interesting to read a different point of view.

I became an atheist in my teens, precisely because the experiential thing never happened for me.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with people who have that experience and use the name “God” to describe it, but I do have a problem when that experience is used to justify belief in a creed. If you truly believe some particular creed, based on your own experience, doesn’t that imply that other creeds are false, and therefore invalidate the experiences of those who hold those creeds?

@14,
exactly, and that is precisely why Islam always veers towards intolerance, with its “there is no god but Allah.” i.e., it starts off hostile to Hinduism from the very.

One of the things I liked best about Red Plenty is that it treats the need for and process of creating visions about human nature / society / the future as a force within the narrative. Each vignette is either driven by characters grappling with that need or engaging in that process or reacting to what just happened through that lens. There are lots of works that are about this kind of stuff, but Spufford dives deeper into the nuts and bolts of these processes, and in a way that’s more narratively satisfying, than is typical.

The new book looks to be in a very similar vein. Probably less about issues like “public reason” and justifying empirical questions in the public square than the stuff Scott Martens talks about: identifying and exploring the personal needs and social factors that result in religious belief, and the consequences of that belief compared to other responses to those needs and factors. Which would indeed treat the subject differently than the New Atheists, as one expression of human drives interacting with the social environment which provides different shadings to living and seeing the world, rather than a childish and immature viewpoint which results from personal weakness or archaic and authoritarian institutions.

Either way, I’m glad Spufford seems to be concerned with the same kinds of things he tackled in RP. Can’t wait until it comes out stateside.

Spufford does some throat-clearing with a pre-emptive litany of the kinds of attacks that non-believers make on religion.

He then attacks the atheistic bus slogan “There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life”, as revealing a rather limited view supposedly taken by atheists of what life should be like.

He finishes by describing the consolation, inspiration, and/or epiphany he found in a piece by Mozart, giving him a sense that there is a kind of mercy inherent in the world. This feeling, and a broader range of feelings about the world, are what he builds his faith on.

It seems very unfair to characterize the attitudes of atheists using an eleven-word slogan; it would be very difficult to come up with a slogan intended for a broad audience that could not be attacked as superficial.

It also seems very unfair and inaccurate to assume that atheists discount the mystery, humor, beauty, and wonder of the universe: it is a kind of denial of their humanity. There is no need to suppose that these perceptions have anything other than a natural basis; indeed, they are only compounded by a belief in their natural basis: what a strange and wonderful thing that there is such a thing as humor, which feels like an utterly fundamental property of the universe, and yet at the same time is entirely “unnecessary”. The cheap shortcut of using a particular set of folk tales to avoid considering such apparent paradoxes has no emotional resonance, to me at least.

Many (possibly most) scientists are atheists. Does Spufford suppose that someone who devotes their life to understanding the universe has an appreciation for its beauty that is second to an appreciation founded not on that general feeling of wonder, nor more particularly on a sense of the presence of a divine nature, nor more particularly on a belief in the emotionally bizarre tenets of Christianity, but finally on the very particular beliefs and rituals of the Anglican church? Where is the logic, in particular the emotional logic, in that?

On the other side of the divide, the rise of the Atheism+ movement (atheists who think they should stand for human rights, against misogynistic bullies and so on) might be worth talking about. It seems that there is a pretty high (not total) overlap between the set of those opposed to A+ and that of aggressive New Atheists.

I’m an American Zen Buddhist, in a sangha that doesn’t demand much in the way of faith. I’m not required to believe in a god — only in the efficacy of Zen practice. Or rather, that it’s worth trying out the practice. From that standpoint, the passionate denunciations of the atheists just whiz right past me. They’re not talking about me.

Yet I also find that I can read Christian or Muslim religious writings and say, “Yes, that’s SO.” I take God or Allah as a metaphor for those who need to experience their practice as a human relationship. The emotions evoked by this metaphor are powerful and useful. I recognize them. God is not my metaphor of choice, it does not resonate, but I cannot deny that it works for many people.

Isn’t that what Spufford is saying? That Christianity, as a practice, can cultivate love, compassion, serenity, acceptance of what must be endured. I understood what he said, and agreed — despite starting from an entirely different viewpoint.

So, it’s time to get my old copy of Aldous Huxley’s “Perennial Philosophy” out of the back bookshelf again, is it?

People who are addicted to bullshit will always find specious justifications for their addiction as well as tired insults to hurl at non-addicts. What else is new?

You folks almost convinced me that this wasn’t available in the U.S., but when I checked Apple’s iBooks store, there it was, with a price in USD. So….

Religion is a comfort object like Linus van Pelt’s security blanket. If only a security blanket, religion might be harmless, or even mildly beneficial to the poor fools that have some deep seated need for it. And we could simply snigger courteously behind our hands as they pass by.

But religion and the religious are a clear and present danger to the rest of us not so deluded, and their threat goes far beyond the considerable tax revenue the steal from the rest of us on an annual basis, or the considerable wealth they have accumulated through theft and fraud. As well as their organised and militant delusions having considerable influence at the domestic and international level on all sorts of issues, more disconcertingly they have a long and continuing history of mayhem, murder and mischief.

For example, the conflicts between the so-called Abrahamic religions continue to rack up casualties like the high score on a pinball machine. Similar the conflicits in Sri Lanka and the Indian sub-continent, throughout Asia and Africa, greatly sourced in religious differences, continue to add to a staggering death toll.

Consequently, this clear and present danger makes it imperative that those not so afflicted by religious memes organize against those who are, simply for their own protection.

Some individuals with religious delusions are good people despite their affliction. That is true. But so what?

These good souls are in the minority, and anyway, suffering their affliction are at risk of turning dangerous at any time.

It also seems very unfair and inaccurate to assume that atheists discount the mystery, humor, beauty, and wonder of the universe: it is a kind of denial of their humanity.

It does seem that some versions of Christianity, having decided not to attack one another, have decided to Other “atheism” instead–those in nominally Christian societies who haven’t, or haven’t yet, accepted Christianity; those who are more educated or worldly than ordinary believers and may have slightly different beliefs; those who don’t use exactly the same vocabulary and narratives to describe the world (it isn’t obvious to me how this could be sustainable without lots of epicycles, or at least lots of mental anguish for lots of people). It seems not quite fair to say to an outsider, “You don’t describe your experience the same way I do, therefore you are incapable of having these wonderful experiences I have,” or even, “You say you don’t understand what it could mean to describe an experience as I do, and would never yourself describe your experience in the same way, therefore you are attacking me and my way of life.” If there’s anything I’m bothered by (beyond the casual dehumanizing of the scientific worldview), it’s the trumpeting of an essentially pagan reaction to art–filtered, granted, through a Christian, largely monastic tradition–as something only a Christian (of a particular sort) could understand.

Steve LaBonne,

Very succinct summary of the situation, but this is not how one wins hearts and minds…

I wasn’t brought up in any religious tradition, and have been an atheist by default for my entire life. But I take religion very seriously, which I think most atheists do, whether out of contempt for the superstition it involves, or in recognition of the incomparably powerful role it plays in human history and culture, or out of respect for the way it informs the understanding of the majority of the human race who are actually believers, or engages the imagination or the philosophical sense of the most thorough unbelievers like me. Generally, I think, all of the above.

I think the place where I intersect with religion most significantly is where I rather envy believers, especially believing Catholics. At, or at least near, the center of Catholic theology is the remarkable notion that no matter what fucked-up shit you’ve been guilty of, you can say you’re sorry and ask to be forgiven, and you will be forgiven by the only forgiver that matters in the whole universe, and that forgiveness will confer eternal grace upon you. I wish I could have that, even though in the grand scheme of things I’ve done very little that really needs forgiving. Of course Catholics are also called upon to believe some seriously stupid shit, and nowadays to hate queers more than they love orphans and cripples, so I haven’t gone all soft on the Whore of Babylon.

it would be very difficult to come up with a slogan intended for a broad audience that could not be attacked as superficial.

Love your neighbor as yourself. All the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.

It’s 14 words, not 11….

I find it odd that people will dismiss the beliefs that motivated MLK, Dorothy Day, Phil Berrigan, and others as obvious trash. Perhaps a little more humility is in order.

On the other hand, I still think this is the best summary of the meaning of life ever written: http://krebscycle.tumblr.com/post/31283660734/the-ultimate-philosophy-text and the second best refutation of theodicy ever. The first, of course, being Job.

Does Spufford’s book deal at all with the cognitive science of religion and (say) ‘dual-process’ thinking?

Informal ideas about deities serve one set of purposes, rational ‘theological’ conceptions quite another, and I’m curious to know whether a reasonable person can choose to go on ‘believing in’ the existence of gods while knowing that such belief is (valuable precisely in that it is) a kinda free-floating cognitive phenomenon, and doesn’t require in any way that gods be ‘real’ (like this bag of baby wipes is real). I’m also curious to hear how any non-lunatics justify ‘theology’ when there’s, say, historiography to be done.

J. Otto Pohl @1 —

Outside of the very narrow world of intellectuals largely isolated from the real world I think that most people do take religion seriously. Certainly there are few people who dismiss it completely like the late Hitchens.

‘Dismiss’ is absolutely the wrong word. Hitchens specifically rejected religious claims (e.g. ‘Jesus rose up to Heaven’) as both factually incorrect and (crucially) bad for you, or at best largely harmless lies that could easily be swapped out for largely helpful likely-not-lies.

Many, many, many strong believers keep two sets of books when it comes to things like the Resurrection; as they do with, say, Tolkien. It’s true when you’re in it. What the ‘Nü Atheists’ seem to miss is that this provisional truth can be beautiful, and that’s good enough. But they don’t ‘dismiss’ the depth of the experience of belief. They just prefer their own, y’know, odours.

Have to agree with Herschel. Contempt is the only serious response. And I, for one, do take seriously those who have contempt for those adults who believe adults who have sex with children are doing nothing wrong. So the logic of your argument I also have contempt for. Anyway, so-called A Atheist are hardly going to be concerned that you, individually, don’t take them seriously.

Re the Mozart bit: I thought immediately of Salieri’s sour response to the divine warblings of the Mozartean clarinet in Amadeus. His Grazie, Signore, was as heartfelt as Spufford’s, but by no means as curative. Like I said, I look forward to the rest of the book.

rootless_e,

I don’t even know who the last two are (not an American), but seriously, what is the problem here? If somebody was motivated to give suffrage to woman because their indefensibly cherry-picking interpretation of Aymara mythology, I will applaud that decision, but does that mean I suddenly have to take seriously the notion that we should sacrifice coca leaves to El Tio in exchange for the minerals we mine from the ground?

Respecting somebody for being a nice person on one issue is entirely compatible with considering them twee on another issue.

Scott Martens @4:

There is something very smarmy and self-assured about the New Atheism (a.k.a. Dawkins and his lot) that bugs the hell out of me. A failure to recognize that the social forces that support belief aren’t absent from the lives of unbelievers, and aren’t without effect either.

I’m inclined to be extremely sympathetic to this, but I was curious about the use of “social forces” here, which if I’m reading correctly is supposed to be a gloss on “emotions that sustain religious belief”. I’ll even go with the latter formulation, but either way, as I’d understand the emotions or social forces in question—rather different beasts, to my mind—there’s something still entirely alchemical about coming out with indestructible souls, etc., at the other end, and to maintain that belief in the light of all else we know. (E.g., the Whiggish view of history is an entirely more comprehensible response.)

That addressed to Alex SL.

Alex SL:
It’s one thing to say “I find your religion unappealing and illogical” and it’s something else to say that belief in that religion is evidence of stupidity and/or superstitious ignorance. What a MLK or Desmond Tutu finds in their religion is not something other people can sneer at without looking foolish.

I would have a much more benign view of believers if I was just on an excursion from another plant. What I care about is not what they believe but what those beliefs seem to make them do. Or at least the bad acts they then seem more prone to.

Well, what does it make them do, though? I’m happy to agree that organized religion is overall a force of reaction. But I would argue, and in fact do, that if you look at actual politically active groups that have explicit religious affiliations, or at conflicts where one or more of the opponents cites religious inspiration, the conflicts, political stances and actions, etc., in question are much better explained in non-religious terms—geopolitical ones, say. (A group like Hezbollah, say, is a perfect example of this. Is bare mention of Hezbollah okay?)

Equally importantly, the vast majority of people that would identify as religious are not especially politically. They stand for reaction, if or to the extent that they do, simply because this is part and parcel of a standard sort of traditionalism, or subservience to authority, or whatever else. I’m not sure that either the fact or the content of religious belief is particularly explanatory here.

(N.B.: The point about discounting explicitly religious motivation cuts both ways, so it holds for MLK and Desmond Tutu just as much as for Hezbollah or the Shiv Sena.)

I always think that the complaint that religion is untrue or illogical is kind of misplaced. I don’t see any reason to think that truth and reason are the highest calling of humanity. The scientific enterprise’s systematic scepticism has its place – it is useful for finding out about our world, and applying that knowledge in useful ways, but there’s no need to insist on applying that scepticism to every human activity – certainly I don’t approach most of my everyday life in anything like a scientific manner. I don’t think the question we should be asking is whether religion is true, but whether it’s useful, either for the individual practicing it or for society as a whole. And it’s here where we should be applying scientific reasoning – not to the claims of religion but to its value. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much scientific practice on either side of the religion ‘debate’ as it stands – mostly a handful of anecdotes and prejudices.

We all know that the meme-cluster cum supporting human institutions can at times be dangerous. Although I think they often get more blame for conflict than in warranted. Religion is also a strong element of group identity, so any conflict pitting two or more human groups with different religious identities is likely to take on religious overtones, even when religion had little to no role in generating the conflict.

I’d also point out that the strongly aggressive political evangelicism we’ve seen recently in the US, is considered by many, including myself to be at least partly a response of the participants to a sense of threat towards their meme-cluster. They see modernization as a threat to their way of life. They’ve how in for example western Europe religious belief has receded and figure they must take strong action to prevent that from happening here. Cultural war, and battles among religions, or between religion and secularism is a strong form cultural war. Expect that either or both sides may escalate the conflict rather than give in. This is why I think simplistic tactics such as contempt are ill advised.

rootless_e,

Oh, I don’t know, people can be stupid about some things and clever about others…

***

At a meta-level, I find it fascinating how these discussions work. The (new) atheist side generally says something on the lines of “believers are wrong, here’s why”, “believers are deluding themselves, here’s why”, or, admittedly, “believers are idiots, here’s why”.

The rejoinders, also on evidence in this thread, are all too often on these lines:

1. You outspoken atheists don’t sufficiently respect religious beliefs and religious believers.

2. People at least in my country (myself excluded, obviously) are so (insert euphemism for intellectual immaturity) that they cannot live without religion, just accept that and shut up (e.g., 29, 49).

3. Your atheist insistence on applying rationality to everything is (not just wrong but) non-human, with the implication that being an atheist means to be either an incomplete, emotionally stunted human or an ivory tower egg-head who has lost touch with what it means to be human (e.g., the original post).

Quite apart from the question whether the first one is applied inconsistently by people who would have no problem with being equally disrespectful towards, say, conservatives or libertarians, one just has to wonder if the second and third really carry more respect towards believers and non-believers, respectively, and towards the very issue under discussion than a clear and honest “your beliefs are mistaken”.

One additional clarification: in the universe of belief embodied in organized religion, the immanent god and the transcendent one have always circled one another somewhat warily. The church and the mosque, being governed more by the fear of temporal chaos than they admit to be, have always favored the latter. I think that this is a mistake, and leads to largely unnecessary conflicts between men of intelligence and good will like those I sense brewing between the Dawkins and Spufford camps. Nietzsche would probably thumb his nose at both of them, I think for good reason, even though I’m willing to admit what a pain in the ass Nietzsche could be when sneering at the folks who’re just trying to get on with things.

Alex SL @64:

People at least in my country (myself excluded, obviously) are so (insert euphemism for intellectual immaturity) that they cannot live without religion, just accept that and shut up (e.g., 29, 49).

I can see how my 49 would seem to be saying something like this, but it wasn’t meant that way at all. I actually agree with a lot of what you’ve been saying. I suppose it’s just that my vaguely historical-materialist predilections (let’s just say) incline me to think that direct rationalist attacks on religious on religion, the content of which I’m quite sympathetic with, are mostly useless with respect to their intended target. Also, I find a lot of the politics of Dawkins, etc., but esp. Dawkins, to be pretty seriously uncongenial. (Also, um, Kant! No seriously, the limits of what rational argument can establish cuts both ways.)

The point being: I’m all for less religious belief, and I think this is a social and political goal we should pursue. For the reasons given above though, I’m not at all convinced that rationalist attacks on the epistemic credentials of religious belief is the way to go.

Nietzsche would probably thumb his nose at both of them, I think for good reason, even though I’m willing to admit what a pain in the ass Nietzsche could be when sneering at the folks who’re just trying to get on with things.

Couldn’t this observation be appended to a consideration of virtually any contemporary theoretical discussion?

This looks like a book I want to read; thanks.

Reminds me a bit of William James. Also of Perry Miller, The New England Mind in the 17th Century:

The ultimate reason of all things they called God, the dream of a possible harmony between man and his environment they named Eden, the actual fact of disharmony they denominated sin, the moment of illumination was to them divine grace, the effort to live in the strength of that illumination was faith, and the failure to abide by it was reprobation.

It seems obvious to me that there are moral facts as well as material facts. (For instance, all beliefs, considered as material states of the brain, arise by the same processes, but everyone in this discussion attributes the additional non-material quality to these states of being true or false.) It seems obvious that we need a specialized language for talking about moral facts, and specialized settings and practices to maintain their salience and to share them. And it seems obvious that when (mis)understood as statements about material facts, these languages and practices will look like superstition. It seems to me (as to Durkheim) that “religion” is really just that domain of culture in which we are conscious of ourselves as conscious, rational beings existing in a moral universe.

I suspect that a lot of the genuinely objectionable aspects of “religion” as it concretely exists are really just the flipside of the materialism of capitalism. If you organize society to treat people as things, their assertion of their status as free moral brings may be violent, and is likely to involve a rejection even of materialism as appropriately applied to the material world. This is very clearly the case with e.g. Creationism. If w tell people, “you are worthless, you don’t count, nothing you say or do matters,” then it’s only natural that they will look for the reply that God loves them and created them specially, and that a story of the world in which they have no different moral status than tools or raw materials must be wrong. (And they are right to do so.) Treating this as just bad geology is missing the whole point.

” … ”

And all the rest is commentary. (In other words, interpretation. Most religions are so flexible they admit believers any interpretation, and therefore any bad behaviour. Tutu shows that in some cases religion does not preclude a good person behaving well.)

Once you have conceded that “I feel it in my heart”, “this makes emotional sense to me” or “this makes me a better person” are adequate justifications for the conclusion that there is a higher intelligence behind the universe or that souls exist, you have given away any intellectual tools to criticize somebody who feels it in their heart that homosexuals should be stoned.

This is an “I refute it thus” moment, surely. If this were the case, the only way a believing Christian could respond to the vilest things done in the name of Xtianity would be to say “who knows whether this is God’s will or not, let us pray”. Fortunately that isn’t the case – there is quite spirited debate among Christians about exactly what it is that God would have believers do in the world. You could say they’re being inconsistent, but I don’t think they’d agree – they’d say they’re witnessing as Christians, and arguing with fellow-Christians is part of that (as it has been since St Paul). You’d end up in the position of an atheist telling religious believers that they’re not religious enough.

Not religious enough? The toll at the existing level of religiousity not high enough? Problem is, even if followers of one religious belief manage to eliminate those who follow other religions, the mayhem is not ended, because the one belief would quickly fragment into many and turmoil between those different faiths would start anew.

Religious belief has been around for a long time. So like murder, rape, war and other afflictions that show no signs of disappearing soon, expect religiousity to afflict us for centuries to come.

Phil,

You have evaded the issue: How can a liberal Christian demonstrate to a fundie Muslim that the latter is wrong (or vice versa) if both consider “my holy book says so” or “I feel in my heart that I am right” to be valid arguments? That approach – the approach of affording religious propositions a respect that is for good reasons not granted any other propositions – atomizes humanity into up to six billion epistemic islands. The only way around that conundrum is to insist on what is available to everybody as a basis for inferring truth, no matter what background they have: evidence and reason.

Scott Martens,

You must have a very strange definition of “working for a lot of people”. Science works universally, objectively, to allow us to fight diseases, put a man onto the moon, predict solar eclipses, blow up cities or conserve endangered species. Religion and spirituality can, at best, be said to “work” in the sense of making people happy who are too immature to face an unpleasant reality. (Well, so would heroin.) These are two very different concepts of working, and only the first has any connection to epistemology.

And as I argued above, science is simply a formalization and professionalization of what everybody does to generate knowledge in their daily lives; it is the religious or magical thinker who arbitrarily excludes some beliefs from being examined with the same cognitive tools that they would use to search for their lost keys or to figure out if unicorns exist. The atheist scientist is consistent; the magical thinker (or the religious scientist) commits the fallacy of special pleading.

That approach – the approach of affording religious propositions a respect that is for good reasons not granted any other propositions – atomizes humanity into up to six billion epistemic islands.

And yet, in practice, it patently doesn’t. I’ve “evaded the issue” as you put it by referring to the Christians who live in this world, who quite plainly do argue about what their faith requires. Arguing between different faiths is trickier, for obvious reasons – an argument between a Pragmatist and a Neo-Kantian is also quite hard to stage. But it can be done.

Can I second JQ’s appeal above:

“I hope we can keep this discussion at the level Spufford’s work justifies. For that purpose, I think we can take the standard criticisms of religion as read, and unlikely to gain any additional force from restatement.”

Stuff like this
Religion and spirituality can, at best, be said to “work” in the sense of making people happy who are too immature to face an unpleasant reality.
can be dispensed with, I think – it’s not really likely to advance debate.

Phil,

I do not really understand the first part of your answer. You argue that real-life Christians are held together in various sects by a kind of tribalism and authoritarianism, and that the various sects argue – and nobody denies that. What I deny is that somebody who thinks in narratives and the making of emotional sense in lieu of evidence and reason has any intellectual tools at their disposal to actually resolve said arguments between the various sects. In contrast, while any particular real-life scientist can happen to be personally irrational, science, math, philosophy, history, etc. have ways of resolving their disputes with reference to reason and evidence, precisely because “it makes emotional sense to me that phlogiston exists” is not considered a valid argument.

And all this is highly relevant to the original post, which, after all, appears to advocate the position that “religious discourse [can] contribute to public deliberation” and uncritically mentions requests for theologians to provide input on economic policy. If I understand you correctly, you would like to exclude the patently obvious problems from discussion: What reasonably qualifies a theologian to pronounce on any real world issue whatsoever? Is their any foundation for religious discourse, like, at all? In other words, is there any reason to assume that there is a benefit to having religious discourse contribute to public deliberation, if there is no way of demonstrating that it is based on anything but wishful thinking? And perhaps, what theologians would you ask to contribute – Christians, Muslims, Jews… Pastafarians, Discordians, Neo-Pagans? And if one of them not, then again, on what basis? — But if these questions are excluded, what is left to discuss?

You argue that real-life Christians are held together in various sects by a kind of tribalism and authoritarianism, and that the various sects argue – and nobody denies that.

I didn’t say that at all. I said that Christians who recognise one another as Christians, argue among themselves – passionately – about what their shared Christian faith requires. Which they do, and which they wouldn’t – or couldn’t – do if your idea of religion were accurate.

What I deny is that somebody who thinks in narratives and the making of emotional sense in lieu of evidence and reason has any intellectual tools at their disposal to actually resolve said arguments between the various sects. In contrast, while any particular real-life scientist can happen to be personally irrational, science, math, philosophy, history, etc. have ways of resolving their disputes with reference to reason and evidence, precisely because “it makes emotional sense to me that phlogiston exists” is not considered a valid argument.

In other news, physics isn’t philosophy.

There are lots of ways of arguing which don’t depend on the scientific method but also don’t rely on “it makes emotional sense to me”. Religious believers use all of them. So do many other people (philosophers, politicians, lawyers etc).

I will dive into this as soon as I have time, which will probably be when my 6-month old son reaches puberty. You folk who read books for a living don’t know how lucky you are. Or I dunno, maybe you do.

After working in a couple of conflict zones supposedly fuelled by religious intolerance – Sri Lanka and now Israel / Palestine – I get very tired of atheists using them as evidence that religion is an excuse for conflict.

Firstly because religion is only involved in as much as it forms a part of one group or another’s ethnic and political identity. I can’t deny that faith is often recruited to aid political causes but at heart these are always still political causes, usually involving land or other resources.

And secondly because there is no way to count the number of conflicts, major or minor, that never even started because religion successfully suppressed both intra- and inter-communal discord and promoted harmony.

Either way, for good or ill, religion does not really “do” anything of its own accord, it’s just a powerful way of expressing and asserting already existing social preferences. It can be as radical as it can reactionary. Slap the next lefty who mocks a Hare Krishna.

Faith of course is a different question, and this is where it gets more interesting. Seems to me that the leap of faith is a strange and wonderful thing, and I kind of envy those who can do it. But even secular people believe in plenty of abstract concepts that do not, in fact, exist in some shared plane where we all have access to them through our individual windows of language, even though we behave every day as though this is the case.

Most human beings have the ability to perceive, and the need for, a higher purpose, meaning to their lives, and so on. Militant atheism denies it, organized religion exploits it.

Electrons are a refutation of the claim that science doesn’t use metaphors. Science is an ongoing production of metaphors which has grudgingly learned to let go of the ones that don’t work. Phlogiston, the ether, transmutation.

Electrons are everywhere and nowhere, both waves and particles, a probability distribution. On the other side of a certain energy barrier, there will be, like cannibals in the British Navy, absolutely none, which is to say, there will be a certain amount. Thus transistors, integrated circuits, microprocessors, the Internet.

Do electrons exist? Sure, for all practical purposes, but maybe someday we’ll find a better way to explain what goes on.

that is precisely why Islam always veers towards intolerance, with its “there is no god but Allah.”

I just flicked through the comments and I couldn’t see that anyone had responded to this, but apologies if I’m repeating anyone.

The very first commandment of Christianity is:

“I, the Lord, am your God. You shall not have other gods besides me.”

I don’t think that’s noticeably more tolerant than “there is no God but Allah”. It’s the same, in fact.

I’m an atheist, and I deeply admire the Puritans who destroyed absolutism in England.

I also think most of their beliefs were utterly crazy.

Ok, here’s where I have a problem with Spufford in this first chapter. Where it’s not knocking down strawman atheists, the chapter is talking about mercy. Of which he says: “It does not only mean some tyrant’s capacity to suspend a punishment he has himself inflicted. It can mean – and does mean in this case – getting something kind instead of the sensible consequences of an action, or as well as the sensible consequences of an action.”

And here we have a problem. Because while the experience of mercy he talks about is part of the religious experience, so is the need for mercy. Spufford has an argument with his wife, it seems, about the sort of common, hurtful, mistakes everybody makes. What is the naturalistic response to this? Feel sad. Try to make amends. Try to be a better person in the future. Try to be worthy of forgiveness from the person you have hurt. The emotional response that the religious experience promotes, on the other hand, is not to feel sad, but rather to feel guilty. To feel like you are a bad, terrible, awful fuck-up of a person, who deserves, who needs to be punished. Any mercy here is, in fact, the tyrant suspending the doom he himself has pronounced. (True, some nonbelievers often feel this sort of guilt too. But we have psychotherapy for that.)

So, yes, stop worrying and enjoy life. Or that’s the billboard version anyway. If we wanted to be totally honest about it, we’d say: “The aim of [atheism] is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.”

I was left wondering what the University administrators who paid the guy’s salary thought about it.

Why didn’t you ask him, instead of looking to insult his integrity?

Why didn’t you ask him, instead of looking to insult his integrity?

Whatever for? The guy had made his own position perfectly plain in a public forum. I was mildly curious as to how those views played with his colleagues, but even in the unlikely event that my curiosity tempted me to find out, I wouldn’t regard him as the go to source for other people’s opinions. And I’m not trying to insult his integrity. His views were entirely consistent and, as I said, he made no secret of them. His integrity was fine.

I have a relative who went through a succession of increasingly fundamentalist churches and then an ultimately-failed marriage to a fundamentalist woman, because he was homosexual and trying to “cure” it so he could live in harmony with his faith. In the end he couldn’t go straight or accept his sexuality, so he escaped into a liquor bottle.

My mother lives in joyful certainty that she will see her mother’s parents again in heaven one day. She also lives in dreadful certainty that her father’s parents will endure an eternity of torture for their unbelief.

In high school I had a friend whose father seemed perfectly normal and sociable in most respects, but he also threatened violence against abortion providers because God gave him that mission.

It seems unlikely to me that the prominent New Atheists would have found such large audiences if malignant examples of faith weren’t still common.

I wouldn’t regard him as the go to source for other people’s opinions. And I’m not trying to insult his integrity.

I’m afraid you are. The first sentence is a perfect example.

I’m afraid you are. The first sentence is a perfect example.

You are either an idiot or a troll or both. The go to source for somebody’s opinions is that person, not a colleague or an employee or employer of that person. To suppose otherwise is actually conducive to the disruption of relationships and organisations, because in the demotic it’s called rumour mongering. I shall not respond to you any further.

Phil: This is getting to some serious hair-splitting now, especially about meaning of words; but I should maybe have expected so much after the difficulty of getting “arguing about” and “resolving arguments” sorted out…

I don’t accept that using those cognitive faculties would necessarily involve those Christians becoming atheists, for the simple reason that it plainly doesn’t: you can be a Christian and an intellectual.

Of course you can be a scientist and religious. You can also be married and cheat on your spouse; you can be a police officer and deal drugs in your free time; you can campaign against abortions and have one yourself. For certain definitions of can, in all cases, definitions that do not include intellectual consistency.

Your rationalism doesn’t do the work you want it to. You can show (that word again) that pi doesn’t equal 3 and that crop rotation makes sense, and argue those propositions down to number theory & molecular chemistry respectively. You can’t show that “religion is not based on anything more than fantasy”

And now we can argue at length about the word “show” (or prove, or demonstrate, or infer…), and depending on your tastes, which I am ignorant of, we could explore solipsism, postmodernism, the problem of induction, perhaps simply the fact, of which as a scientist I am happily aware, that scientific knowledge is only ever tentative, or perhaps something more surprising. I doubt that that would lead anywhere in a reasonable time, so I will cut it short in the same way as above: intellectual consistency.

Nobody is, in their daily life, for practical purposes, in any doubt about the ability of evidence and reason to demonstrate truths about the world around us. Nobody except the dangerously insane are really, on a practical, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is level, solipsists, postmodernists, or in any way doubtful enough about the ability of science to show things to be true that they would be unsurprised if gravity suddenly reversed itself, their car spontaneously melted at 20°C, or items repeatedly failed to remain at the spots where they last placed them – and in all these cases they would first search for a materialist explanation, because those are the ones that work. A real solipsist or postmodernist could not live because they would be unable to formulate any expectation about how their environment would behave, or even be, at any point in the future.

So my rationalism does not do any heavy lifting that the other six billion people on this planet don’t routinely use it for either – not any more but not any less. The only thing standing between the religious and weak atheism is special pleading: “Reason is good for these areas where I use it daily, but not for these my cherished beliefs*. Why? Because that is different. It just is. That’s why it is called religion, to show you that you should not use reason there. Stop being so disrespectful.” — “Yes, I disbelieve in unicorns because there is no reliable evidence for them, but I believe in god – your point?” — It is really that easy, as sad as it is.

*) Which may, of course, also be non-religious, as in the case of medicinal woo.

@Katherine: I think, note think it’s hard to tell on the Internet, that the comment at 14 was a joke (why specifically anti-Hindu, it could be anti-Horus or anti-Thor). If I am right, it was a pretty good one.

I have no trouble with “religion as emotion” creed, and Francis Spufford does write beautifully. However, accepting the theist hypothesis as a defect that it shares with accepting any other unnecessary hypothesis: soon, holding on to it impairs reasoning faculties. You can see it right in Spufford’s essay when he writes:

I don’t know if there’s a God. ([…]. It isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item

Whether there is a supreme being that created the Universe and rules it and which is the source of all moral authority or not seems to me to be an eminently knowable item. Personally, I’d be even inclined to take the scriptures at face value: show me people suddenly learning new tongues, drinking poisons without getting harmed and curing sick people by touching them, and I’d be kind of convinced that I might have missed something. But I am not holding my breath, and I fully expect to live my whole life without ever witnessing a situation or, yes, experiencing an emotion that would require me to make the hypothesis “that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being” to quote Spufford’s nice words.

And nice words there are. Surely, there are things kept in being by continual and infinitely patient acts of love, both given and received. And that is us. Isn’t that enough?

For certain definitions of can, in all cases, definitions that do not include intellectual consistency.

And round we go again. You’ve assumed that “Christian intellectual” is inherently inconsistent, like (say) “superstitious statistician”. But it’s only inherently inconsistent if you start from the position that all beliefs not grounded in scientific inquiry are self-consoling fantasy. You haven’t given me any reason why I should adopt that position.

“Reason is good for these areas where I use it daily, but not for these my cherished beliefs*. Why? Because that is different. It just is

Christians do use reason, they just don’t apply the scientific method to the foundation of their beliefs. Neither do philosophers, political thinkers or anyone else who thinks ethics and morality are worth arguing about. You can’t find the Holy Spirit with an ammeter; you can’t find class consciousness or the Husserlian epoche that way, either. It doesn’t make those things any less real and interesting & worth arguing about, for those who think they’re real and interesting & worth arguing about. (Those who don’t are free to argue about other things.)

in case you haven’t noticed Dobson and MLK professed the same religion. We’re allowed to sneer at the latter but not the former? Why?

Cranky – if you want to sneer at Martin Luther King, do go ahead. (I think the point is that you might not want to.)

If religion is defined in a way that allows it to be entirely devoid of any normative or factual claims

Not sure where ‘normative’ comes from there. Restricting it to factual claims, my argument (as at #83) is that factual claims are very much secondary; it’s not that you’re a Christian because you believe in the Resurrection, it’s more that you believe in the Resurrection because that’s what Christians do. And, for many (most?) believers, it’s more a case of trying to believe in the factual claims – which you may not even take literally.

Henry, you’re surprised? Really?

Henry,

I did not consider this discussion uncivilized, actually enjoyed it, and hope I have not come across as arseholeish. As indicated above, I fear that part of the issue is that many people consider “your views about religion are wrong” to be deeply offensive even if they would cheerfully write, and read without taking offense, “your views about politics are wrong”, and there is really no logical reason to make that difference.

Phil, Niall,

Again, that might be true for a highly sophisticated theologian, but it is certainly not true for the vast majority of believers. And if Christians only believe the resurrection because of peer pressure, all the worse!

Really, I think one can hardly define Christianity, for example, in a way that excludes factual claims. At an absolute minimum, a Christian would have to believe that Jesus was an exceptional moral teacher and role model (an idea of which an attentive reader of the gospels should be disabused quite quickly, by the way). Otherwise, you could just as well accept that somebody self-describes as a communist while advocating a Randian utopia. To be useful for communication, words need to have meanings.

Good night for now.

“To be useful for communication, words need to have meanings.”

Several nested layers of meanings, so that you can recite the Credo on Sundays as if you believe it, and retreat to discussions of your emotional experience of the mercy you perceive in the inner workings of the Universe from Monday to Saturday.

More comments than I expected here. Henry, thank you for your request for a modicum of good manners – some comments are definitely too much on the personal abuse end of the spectrum. More than that, the point about Spufford’s book is that it’s an invitation to expand your understanding of something even if you don’t agree with it, which you can’t do if you dismiss the whole activity a priori. And I don’t welcome grandstanding for the sake of it in this comments thread.

I cannot speak for Spufford and I can only ask people to read what he has himself written.
But I should state that he is pretty clear that he is speaking from a British and European context in which unbelief, whether based on indifference or antipathy to religious discourse, is pretty well the norm. This is the context in which he’s saying that religion is actually about rather different things than the standard put-downs might lead you to think.His local situation is obviously rather different from the US context. Besides, while he does have some things to say about Judaism and Islam, he doesn’t know them from the inside and so forbears from saying much, and of course any exploration of a different religious tradition would be, well, different…

AlexSL wants to make points about the grounds of knowledge of any sort. I think part of Spufford’s point is that not the ‘bad science’ case that there are privileged sources of knowledge. It’s that we think about various areas of human activity differently – our relationships, for example, are not susceptible to knowledge and analysis in the same way as scientific activity is normally conducted; same goes for, as some have noted, our engagement with art and literature. But we do have some ways of thinking and talking ‘about’ all these kinds of activities. There’s ordinary human discourse based on empathy, understanding, interest, grounded in ordinary street-level epistemology. And there’s psychology, aesthetics, and yes, theology, in which there are standards of discourse, conditions of coherence, and so on. The epistemological grounding for our knowledge is itself the product of discourse, evaluation, and so on, and authors interested in religious discourse have themselves contributed to such debates (Pannenberg, or Kolakowski, for example).

Much of the New Atheist argument reduces to “your favorite band sucks”. If I claim to find deep spiritual meaning in George Clinton’s oeuvre, the rejoinder that the lyrics suck the tunes are repetitious, and often Bootsy does not make it back on the 4, is besides the point. The argument that some other fans are loutish is also irrelevant.

Oops – entails that a belief in God is not being a good way

Couldn’t this observation be appended to a consideration of virtually any contemporary theoretical discussion?

No. Discussion should be an annoyance-free zone, and anyone who intruded annoyance into it is clearly a religious zealot (or conversely an atheistic mechanistic materialist).

Dawkins and Hitchens never over-simplified their approach toward religion. I can sum up their views in one sentence: religions consistently makes claims about the world that are not true — or as Sam Harris once noted, religions are failed sciences. Exactly. Earth is the center of the universe? Nope, got that wrong. The sun revolves around the earth? Nope. Got that one wrong, too. Human beings appeared out of the blue one day because they were created in some kind of sudden cosmic flash? Nope. And so on and on and on…

reason 10.08.12 at 1:52 pm

Why would it matter? The argument that the Buzzcocks or Elgar offer a much superior musical experience carries no more logical force than the one that all music is tedious and rational men and women should not get emotional about sounds. The claim that “I draw enjoyment or spirituality or moral strength from X” is not refutable by “I don’t like X” or “X is logically contradictory” or similar critiques.

The more I think about it @136, the more I think this is the issue here! Thoughts anyone?

Well truly if you think that, you must think they are just offereing an alternative band, but they are not.

But that’s not strictly so. I, and I’m prepared to bet rootless_e, muddled along contentedly being atheist for decades without any encouragement from the “New” kind. We shut the door on occasional Mormons and Adventists, went to church every couple of years if we happened to be in a town with a particularly coochie Cathedral, to admire the stained glass, donated to secular charities and otherwise gave no thought to the whole issue.

And then suddenly our living room is invaded by a bunch of yahoos with vuvuzelas, who demand that we put our lives on hold and join the Movement. Well, if I’m going to join a movement it’ll be one for disability rights, thank you. I fully recognise that people who campaign for very important things like equality for women and gay people often find themselves having to take on bigots who are religious, but in the context, that’s an epiphenomenon of bigotry. I’m simply not interested, per se, in what origin stories people choose to believe in, even though I’m perfectly convinced that mine, via cosmology and evolutionary biology, is right.

The problem with the Dawkins set is that they go to immense lengths to make it as hard as possible to distinguish between themselves and the Adventists on whom I shut the door. They ought to go right back to the beginning and rethink what they want and how thye want to bring it about.

1. You outspoken atheists don’t sufficiently respect religious beliefs and religious believers.
—

But that “or” marks the difference. It’s one thing to say, Albert Einstein’s ideas on spirituality make no sense to me, and something completely other to say Einstein’s stupid spirituality is an indication of childish ignorance.

For my part, if someone who does good things ascribes her moral strength to her faith in the teachings of the Catholic Church or the Diamond Sutra, I am only too happy to congratulate her and admire her faith. And I’d find sneering at that faith to be both shallow and ill-mannered.

My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought me through my childhood piously in the Dissenting way. But I was scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist. My arguments perverted some others, particularly Collins and Ralph; but, each of them having afterwards wrong’d me greatly without the least compunction, and recollecting Keith’s conduct towards me (who was another free-thinker), and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.

Benjamin Franklin.

reason, yes of course I understand that. What I fail to understand, and find extremely unsympathetic, is why they are so hostile to believers in various supernatural systems who also accept the science.

I find it unsympathetic, because to me the key objective is the defense of the science. I don’t understand how people manage to do both at the same time any more than you do, but if people can, and they want to be on my team in this fight, I welcome them, and I don’t want to sit by while other people mock them to no purpose but their own amusement.

Oh come on. Look the reason these “new” athiest are loud and aggressive is because of the attack on science by YEC in the US. If you can’t where they are coming from, I think you are bit naive

I don’t know what YEC is, but I can assure you that the atheist Neo-cons have no more respect for science than do the most God-struck fundamentalists.

And if you don’t know that YEC is a Young Earth Creationist, you may not be well-placed to engage in this discussion…

oops
…. to JUSTIFY great evil. (End of first paragraph).

Most neocons are not atheists and most atheists are not neocons. Most of the leading neocons were avowed Christians – many of the exceptions, like Joe Lieberman, were devout followers of other faiths.
—

Sorry, but the intellectual leaders of the neocon movement, from Strauss, to Podhoretz to Kristol to Kirkpatrick were far from avowed Christians. Wolfowitz, Cheney, etc. – the same. Here you can even find it in the Holy Source (Wikipedia):

In the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in neoconservative magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support of intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this – along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even tactical politics, to attract religious supporters

Irving Kristol was no Christian and certainly not a believing Jew either. What you are missing is that YEC’ers are not making a point about belief – they are making a point about authority.

Look the reason these “new” athiest are loud and aggressive is because of the attack on science by YEC in the US.

Three words: Stephen Jay Gould.

ajay: You are saying that it’s logically impossible to find actual evidence of class consciousness?

I’m saying it’s logically impossible to find evidence that’ll reliably persuade people who don’t believe in class consciousness.

As my formal training is in the study of religions, I should have something to say about all of this but for now I just want to address the remark that “science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor” which is absolutely false:

“[E]ven the most austerely ‘scientific’ models operate through analogy and metaphor. The Rutherford-Bohr model depicts the hydrogen atom as a miniature solar system. Darwin’s concept of ‘natural selection’ is analogous to the ‘artificial selection’ practised by animal breeders. ‘Plate tectonics’ is about thin, flat, rigid areas of ‘crust’ floating on a highly viscous but fluid ‘mantle.’ Linguists talk of the ‘brain mechanism’ by which grammatical language is generated. And so on. Scientific theories are unavoidably metaphorical. [….] Sometimes a ready-made model can be taken over from another branch of science—for example Fresnel’s model of light as the vibration of an elastic medium. Sometimes the key elements come out of everyday life, as in von Neumann’s model of economic behaviour as a ‘game,’ or the molecular-biological model of DNA as a genetic ‘code.’ This heterogeneity is not a serious defect. The scientific value of a theoretical model, as with all metaphors, does not require it to be literally equivalent to the system it represents. It resides in the variety of phenomena that it makes plain, or suggests. This understanding seldom comes through elaborate formal analysis. [….] Indeed, analogy and metaphor cannot be driven out of scientific reasoning. Scientific ideas cannot be communicated through the ‘literal’ medium of formal logic. [….] [In fact], the history of a scientific discipline can be traced through its changing repertoire of models and metaphors—what Gerald Holton calls its themata. Modern physics, for example, deals in ‘forces’ and ‘fields,’ or ‘waves’ and ‘particles,’ and has no place for pre-modern themata such as ‘sympathies,’ and ‘attractions,’ or ‘essences’ and ‘effluvia.’ [….] It is clear that scientific maps, models, metaphors, themata and other analogies are not just tools of thought, or figures of speech. They are the very substance of scientific theory. As sources of meaning and understanding, they stand on equal footing with explicit verbal and symbolic representations.”—John Ziman

Several other papers and books might be cited on indispensable role of metaphor in scientific reasoning, for example, Brown, Theodore L. Brown’s Making Truth: Metaphor in Science (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003)

@Reason
To be clearer, I can’t speak for Mason, but I think that Durkheim didn’t claim that there was a “moral universe” in the religious sense, just that the people who praticed religion felt that way.

The problem with the Dawkins set is that they go to immense lengths to make it as hard as possible to distinguish between themselves and the Adventists on whom I shut the door.

Yes, exactly this. I can’t take seriously people who say they want to leave religion behind, while retaining religion’s single most obnoxious feature–a belief-based belligerent identity politics.

Regarding John Q. @ 14:

“If you truly believe some particular creed, based on your own experience, doesn’t that imply that other creeds are false, and therefore invalidate the experiences of those who hold those creeds?”

This is not necessarily the case in non-Abrahamic traditions like Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. For example, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, one might reason in a way in which epistemological and even in some measure ethical pluralism is perfectly compatible with a Putnam-like version of scientific realism:

“To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate ‘true’ metaphysical descriptions of the world does not…necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this ‘real’ or ‘true’ world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. We need not accept a very different solution, such as that offered by Kant—that there is a world in which there exists the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but that we can never directly know this world. Indian classical philosophy, since it is always connected with religion, must and does believe with complete assurance in the possibility of human beings actually attaining to a perfect knowledge of Reality—a ‘scientia intuitiva’ that leads to the Divine or the Absolute Truth. The conceptual frameworks we build in the realm of rational thought are not useless just because they cannot describe Ultimate Reality. Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.” (Nandini Iyer, ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So,’ in Knut A. Jacobsen, ed., Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson, 2005, p. 123)

Similarly, consider the Jains:

http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/09/jaina-propaedeutic-for-metaphysical.html

Philosophical examinations of some forms of mystical experience (as involving states of ‘pure consciousness’ or an ’empty mind’) also discourage creedal exclusivity, as seen in the work of Robert K.C. Forman, such experience said to be common across several religio-philosophical traditions.

On the complex role between beliefs, creeds, and religious experience or praxis, see John Cottingham’s The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy, and Human Value (2005).

Henry@119: To me it seems a toss-up

I puzzle over why some of the commenters dismiss the possibility of there perhaps existing “other ways of knowing” apart from scientific hypothesis-testing-confirmation, which is based on a very specific mode of thought (“rational”, “scientific”, “Enlightenment”). Isn’t it conceivable that just as there are multiple forms of intelligence, there might be multiple forms of coming-to-know? (As an aside, neuroscientists are now investigating the neurophysiological bases of the emotions and even of religious experience, though the latter is in its infancy – the fact that we do not understand what happens in the human brain during the religious experience does not mean that nothing occurs, only that we don’t yet understand it.)

I have never been visited by the sense of “numinosity”, but cannot in good conscience deny the possibility of others’ being visited by such a sense; there may very well be “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt by [my own, Western Enlightenment Protestant American rationally-grounded] philosophy”.

While admitting that historically, depredations have been/are being committed in the ostensible name of religion, I never understood the justification for such in the actual texts of the religion in which I was raised, which seemed to me very much oriented to a love of one’s neighbor [note to @69: I don’t understand this as an invitation to narcissim, but rather as an exhortation to grant the same human worth and dignity to others that we assign ourselves as living, sentient, moral beings], toleration of our own and others’ inevitable weaknesses and imperfections, forgiveness, and mercy.

I deeply respect those individuals/groups whose religious beliefs inform their actions on behalf of interfaith tolerance and harmonious coexistence, social justice, and human rights – for example, the Institute of Interfaith Dialogue and the American Society of Friends, to name two organizations of whose initiatives I am marginally aware.

Niamh (and Henry), I am trying to follow your example (advice), and engage in dialogue with the OP (I read Spufford’s Introduction and found it compelling) and with some of what earlier commenters have noted. A classically-trained humanist, I am neither a practicing scientist nor a theologian; however, I happen at the moment to be translating a book on how harmonious coexistence can come into being – it is achievable, and imho will need to be sought on a global scale if our species is to survive. A friend of mine, an ethicist by training, once suggested that humankind’s moral evolution lags behind its rational evolution – let us hope this gap might be remediated while there is still time.

Having said this, I’m afraid that commenting on CT reminds me a lot less of going to a big party of people reasonably tolerant of others’ views than of a viva where you know that numerous professors have it in for you from the get-go.

@ 164: Whatever one thınks about Nuatheists they unquestıonably veer to the Rıght. Dawkıns dıdn’t support the Iraq War but some of hıs more recent statements undoubtedly veer ınto rıght wıng LoopyLand. Jerry Coyne is a right wing ‘liberal’ (ın the Amerıcan sense) and Daniel Dennett a ‘centrist’ (ın the Amerıcan sense, whıch makes hım a ‘not centrist at all’ ın the European sense). If one remembers that the Natheıst movement ıs closely assocıated wıth the Amerıcan “skeptıc” movement then the assocıatıon becomes clearer; Mıchael Shermer appears to be a lıbertarıan as, of course, do Penn and Teller, and James Randi has made antıi-“collectıvıst” statements. Hıtchens was notorıous for hıs rıght wıng sub-Amis-esque splutterıng and Sam Harrıs would appear to be some kınd of a quasi-fascıst sociopath.

In terms of the company he keeps, PZ Myers ıs very definitely out on a limb, politically speakıng.

The iınterestıng questıon ıs, why should thıs be the case? Most prevıous atheıst movements were overtly or covertly assocıated wıth the Left. But the Natheists hold fast to the old Amerıcan mantra of Poverty at Home, Bombs Abroad.

And agreed on 166: why should it be logically impossible? You can’t find, I don’t know, union membership rolls, or political voting patterns, or petition signatories, and say “Look, in 1850s Bavaria people weren’t lining up on this issue along class lines. But look at this data from 1910 – there’s a definite class correlation. Look at these speeches by political leaders that refer to the concept of class. Bavarians in 1910 were conscious of themselves as members of a class in a way that just wasn’t true in 1850.”?

dbk @167

I don’t think people dispute that their might be “other ways of knowing”, but I think it might be correct to dispute their reliability. Tests have been made you know. It is well known that strength of emotion is no evidence of correctness.

Mozart wrote beautiful music, therefore Hell.

@ 172

You’re rıght Ajay: once was enough to make ıt true.

ajay – the point is that lots of people don’t think there’s any such thing as “class consciousness”, whatever the data say. If you do believe it’s a useful category, then it makes sense to say that all of those things are signs of it. If you don’t, they’re just signs of a variety of other processes which can be explained in different ways.

179: then your statement’s just a tautology. “It’s impossible to find evidence that will persuade people to believe in class consciousness if the people you are trying to persuade are the sort of person who doesn’t believe in class consciousness whatever the evidence says”. Well, yes.

177: New Atheists are right-wing and believe in “poverty at home and bombs abroad”, despite their public statements to the contrary, and you just know this. OK then, I guess you learned it through some numinous process or something.

“ajay – the point is that lots of people don’t think there’s any such thing as “class consciousness”, whatever the data say. If you do believe it’s a useful category, then it makes sense to say that all of those things are signs of it. If you don’t, they’re just signs of a variety of other processes which can be explained in different ways.”

But there are competing theories in every branch of science (and history is definitely science). This is why we (*gasp*) test our theories against the evidence, make falsifiable predictions, etc. Class consciousness is a rather numinous concept, so you probably start by pinning down the nature of your disagreement. If you both have the exact same model of the world, but you’re calling it class consciousness and she’s calling it something else, then there’s no substantive disagreement. But if you do have differing models of the world, then your models are making different predictions. Then you gather evidence about those predictions, and see which model holds up better. That process may be difficult, but it’s by no means logically impossible.

If, on the other hand, the concept of class consciousness has been reduced to a cipher by successive defeats, such that it makes no predictions compared to a model without it, and its defenders are reduced to “I believe in class consciousness because it gives me nice emotions”… well, then you’ve strayed into the realm of self-deluding nonsense religion.

ajay – the point is that this is the case for lots of concepts in the social sciences, and nobody cares. Marxists make sense to Marxists, conservatives make sense to conservatives, post-modernists boldly refuse to make sense to anyone (to a room full of post-modernists). If religious people can’t find evidence of the existence of God which is good enough to persuade people who don’t want to believe it, well, so what?

Class consciousness is a rather numinous concept, so you probably start by pinning down the nature of your disagreement.

Except that in practice you don’t, and why on earth would you? It’s far more productive to pursue disagreements with people who share the same mental universe as you. If somebody tells me that the key question of our age is the free-floating hybridity of post-human identity, I don’t ask them to justify what they’re saying in terms that will make sense to a Marxist who’s never read Derrida – I just accept that I’m going to have more productive discussions with somebody else.

“77: New Atheists are right-wing and believe in “poverty at home and bombs abroad”, despite their public statements to the contrary, and you just know this”.

Ok Ajay let’s take ıt from another angle. I wıll ıgnore your statement that they have (always wıth the exceptıon of PZ Myers) made such statements because they haven’t. However; point me ın the dırectıon of the statements made by any of the New Atheists that they are socialists, or communists, or socıal democrats. Or that they approve of the the polıtics of, say, Ralph Nader. Or Noam Chomsky. Or Hugo Chavez.

I do find thıs whole thing extremely bizarre ıncidentally. I mean Hıtchens and Harris at least never made their rıght wıng leanıngs any sort of a secret (and Harris ıs an extreme rıght winger at that). Shermer has written a book defendıng “free markets”. Dawkins was recently assocıated wıth A.C. Grayling’s attempt to set up some kınd of a prıvate academy. It’s not as if I am makıng any kınd of a controversial claim here.

no. 2

Emma not having a religion and taking it seriously are not the same. While there are fairly large numbers of people with no religion in industrialized white majority countries, although I am surprised it is so low in Australia, not even a quarter, militant atheists with membership cards in the ‘League of Godless’ are fairly rare. But, perhaps I did not express myself well.

no. 4

I have only been an academic for a short period of time. The total percentage of my life in which I have been an employee of an academic institution is only about 11%. Or less than five years out of a life span of a few years over 40. Even if you add the three years it took me to get an MA and PhD from SOAS it is still less than the years in my adult life I spent outside of academia. I spent a lot more time either being unemployed, doing various freelance work, and doing menial jobs like making lattes or sandwiches then I have teaching university students. Also I think since almost none of my students have been white that a term other than Ivory Tower would apply to me. Maybe Ebony Tower?

@168

Interesting. I’m slightly surprised Harris wasn’t in favour of the Iraq war. (Based solely on how bellicose he seems in End of Faith.) My estimation of him has moved up slightly.

dbk @182
Huh?

I think you missed my point. More and more, research is showing that our brains have certain biases that lead us to misinterpret the world around us. Your holding up the possibility of “other ways of knowing”, doesn’t invalidate this. If we misinterpret the physical world around us, we can also misinterpret the non-physical world. I’m arguing that we need to be more skeptical about “knowing” in general. If this leads to more tolerance of other view points, well and good, but there is a danger it goes the other way, and people claim knowledge which can’t be independently verified and then act on it. In a shared society, this is potentially dangerous.

niamh @194
This may make sense to you, but it is just a lot of words to me. I haven’t a clue what you are on about. Maybe I’m missing the religious gene. I wonder how other people feel about this?

I wıll ıgnore your statement that they have (always wıth the exceptıon of PZ Myers) made such statements because they haven’t.

Once again, your numinous sense has led you astray…

“…there are two reasons why we need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian).”
– Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is also a republican, an opponent of capital punishment, an opponent of the Iraq war, and a Labour supporter (in the 1970s) turned Lib Dem (after the invasion of Iraq). That’s… not your typical right-wing history.

They hide all this stuff in a place called “The Internet”.

However; point me ın the dırectıon of the statements made by any of the New Atheists that they are socialists, or communists, or socıal democrats. Or that they approve of the the polıtics of, say, Ralph Nader. Or Noam Chomsky. Or Hugo Chavez.

I found a rather good explanation of the “Fallacy of the Excluded Middle” there as well.

(niamh @ 194): “a pretty central element of the Christian tradition: it’s a way of living that calls on you to give of yourself without caution or fear, and that is inspired by the vision of a vision of a world of fullness and kindness beyond our limits (all that imagery of ‘the kingdom of God’. Or of ‘the republic’ if you prefer…).”

I think that’s true. Compare John Cottingham, a philosopher in the “analytic” tradition, and a Catholic:

“Current attitudes to religion among philosophers are highly polarized, some impatient to see it buried, others insisting on its defensibility. But as long as the debate is conducted at the level of abstract argumentation alone, what is really important about our allegiance to, or rejection of, religion, is likely to elude us. There is, to be sure, a cognitive core to religious belief, a central set of truth-claims to which the religious adherent is committed; but it can be extremely unproductive to try to evaluate these claims in isolation. There are rich and complex connections that link religious belief with ethical commitment and individual self-awareness, with the attempt to understand the cosmos and the struggle to find meaning in our lives; and only when these connections are revealed, only when we come to have a broader sense of the ‘spiritual dimension’ within which religion lives and moves, can we begin to see fully what is involved in accepting or rejecting a religious view of reality. “ (reference above in earlier comment)

And consider the reasons that motivate Linda Zagzebski’s “direct reference” theory of “the good:” According to Zagzebski, the “concept of good person arises from exemplars:” “We do not have criteria for goodness in advance of identifying the exemplars of goodness.” Thus, the phronimos, that is, the person who exhibits practical wisdom, “can be defined, roughly, as a person like that, where we make a demonstrative reference to a paradigmatically good person.” The late Robert Nozick wrote about such practically wise and good persons in perhaps his best work, Philosophical Explanations (1981):
“We all know people, I hope, who bring out the best in us, people in whose presence we would be embarrassed to speak or act from unworthy motives, people who glow. In their presence we feel elevated. We are pushed, or nudged further along a path of development and perfection; rather, we are inspired to move ourselves along, in the direction shown. [….] We want to find a way of living whereby our best energies and talents are poured out so as to speak to and improve the best energies and talents of others. We want to utilize our highest parts and energies in a way that helps others to flourish.”

It may very well be the case that we don’t intimately know such people as Nozick describes, or our encounters with them are few and far between. In such instances we can turn to literature as a substitute for live moral exemplars, for “if all the concepts in a formal ethical theory are rooted in a person, then narratives and descriptions of that person are morally significant [as in the narrative accounts, say, of the Buddha or Buddhist arahant or bodhisattva, the Daoist or Stoic sage, Jesus and Christian saints, Gandhi, Sufi saints…].” Narratives are given a priority in an exemplarist virtue ethics, for they’re capable of providing us with “detailed and temporally extended observations of persons.” Of course we need not simply have recourse to the narratives of perfectly good persons of the sort we often encounter in religious literature. Less-than-perfect narrative exemplars found in many novels can model the sort of virtue required “in the messy situations that ordinary, less-than-virtuous persons encounter in modern life….” As Zagzebski reminds us, cultures have traditionally “enshrine[d] the wisdom of exemplars in myths, legends, the lives of saints and heroes, and in sacred literature,” while today we more often turn to personal acquaintances and literature (or even films) for our moral exemplars, although we’re faced, alas, with the unfortunate fact that the post-modern novel represents a “notable decline in the depiction of individuals who are morally better than the ordinary, [as] art no longer has the function of representing moral exemplars.” The primary task of (ethical) literary criticism in the contemporary world might therefore be one of identifying those works of literature, in particular perhaps novels, distinctive for their narrative depictions in the broadest sense of moral exemplars (as well as their converse). In Love’s Knowledge Nussbaum invokes works by Henry James, Dickens, and Proust (among others), although we can well imagine other writers perfectly suited to this task: Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Dostoevsky, Pablo Neruda (a poet), Naguib Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, J.M. Coetzee, Ursula Le Guin, Nadine Gordimer, and Margaret Atwood, for example.

And I think it may be possible to have a “non-religious” or philosophical spirituality (as a ‘way of life’) as well, but only if it’s part of a tradition or traditions of praxis in some manner, say, like that of the Stoic tradition (the reasons for this have to do with the cultivation of pedagogical methods, of specific forms of spiritual praxis, and the nature of the student/teacher relationship found in these traditions). On this, see here: http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2010/02/religion-spirituality-and-philosophy.html

here: http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2010/02/religion-spirituality-and-philosophy.html

and here: http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2012/06/the-therapeutic-model-of-philosophy-philosophy-as-applied-philosophy.html

I’ve always had a bit of an issue with statements like “recoil in horror at the idea that theologians should be consulted about economic policy”. I’ve held a conjecture that the more successful religions mostly became so because they appeared to convey some positive social lifestyle benefits. I also think that the founders and major pholosophers of such religions put effort into determining what sort of legal framewirks seemed to deliver better benefits socialwise. In an utilitarian sense, these observations then get bundled into doctrine and attributed to a devine being. Now, clearly there was not a developed social science in the ancient world so the observors were not infallible, and the social problems are not the same today as then, but as a first approximation to creating a stable and reasonably just society they aren’t a bad starting point. And of course, we have the salability of the morality, which is usually enhanced if it can be attributed to a god that many believe in.

So in terms of economic matters, our relationship to debt has been an issue for thousands of years. The accumulation of debt burden over time, and its role in creating a class of unfortunates, who because their debt is unpayable tend to become serfs, was a major social problem in the societies from which these religions sprang, and some of the solutions regarding stuff like debt jubilees still have salence today.

niamh @ 194:

I think Spufford doesn’t think he’s talking about this. But then he stats talking about why I’m a “plastic being” whose life is meaningless, and his justification for it is that he experiences divine mercy and I don’t. Which divine mercy he basically describes as a cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card which lets you feel ok when things are too awful to bear. But here’s the thing: I’ve had a hard life. I’ve experienced at least my fair share of hard times, often caused by my own HPtFtU. So I’ve experienced sadness, and anger, and yes, guilt and shame as well. And it seems to me that, as much as life can suck, without some kind of cognitive distortions messing things up, things can be bad, but they don’t get too awful to bear. So I don’t need his divine mercy, and I resent him telling me I’m a shallow person for not wanting to need it.

reason@195: Thank you, I think I understand your point a little better.

Certainly some degree of skepticism is appropriate to many forms of knowing , including both rationality and emotionality, to name the two modes we were both referring to. The question that remains for me is whether skepticism (rational doubt and analysis of logical fallacies) is ultimately the appropriate tool of verification for religious experience; here, I must remain skeptical.

O my people! God has spoken to me and He has revealed to me that you are all commanded to vote for Nader – that is if he’s running this year – but definitely not for that guy with the drones – no not him; and furthermore that your navies are hateful and an abomination in His sight and lastly that your sacrament shall be Budweiser: The King of Beers – those craft beers are simply unacceptable. This I say unto you.

Hallelujahgobble! Hallelujahgobble!

Rationality also has big, big problems.

First off, you have to say where you are coming from, because that allows others to evaluate. I had a full-blown mystical experience, outside of any theology, many decades ago, but I am not able to understand whether this was a waking-up from psychological illness as an abreaction of trauma, or whether it also had independent correlates to some greater awareness in the universe, or both. I simply don’t know, and there is no real yardstick to sort it out.

Next, you have to separate anyone’s personal experience from the institutional structure of religion, and perhaps the local institutional structure they have encountered, which padlocks the theology to gain newcomers.

Then, rationality has big problems, which appear to reassert themselves in new dress forms, in each new historical era. This category goes far beyond the simple “cognitive biases” in the application of rationality, difficult or impossible to correct as some of them are (Daniel Kahneman’s new book is a terrific, essential overview of the scientific evidence on cognitive biases). Rationality itself (Kahneman’s “System 2”) also has systematic failures:

There are fundamental sources of uncertainty coming from our current science. Murray Gell-Mann’s list is: the coarse-graining of the maximal realm, the probabilistic character of its branching accidents into the future, the ignorance of the observer of the outcomes of most accidents that have already occurred in the universe, and the approximations and limitations on accuracy imposed by our computational tools.

Than there is an astonishingly short list of the basic kinds of distinctions we can make between things: Same/different, equals/unequals, more/less, numbers, negatives, opposites, subject/predicate, before/after, cause and effect, foreground/background, left/right, whole/part etc.

Yet the contexts of these distinctions appear to be infinite. How we come to them, how we find them, and how we combine them or link them together, appear to be infinite. Yet the formation of these contexts are beyond simple logic from the distinctions, coming from outside the logical equation, as the later Wittgenstein pointed out (from many different avenues of approach).

We are unable to build, even by computer algorithm, any general way to contextualize our ideas up to the Absolute (whether the absolute is real or not, that is not the point), and we must re-enter the semantics ourselves into the computer programs, at almost every new level, as we do in expert systems. (This sort of concern led the later Kurt Gödel to theism.)

Finally, we don’t know what consciousness is, or where it comes from. The current scientific guess, as best I can make out, is that consciousness is a certain level of the complexity of matter. This is pretty much gibberish — really it is a belief, only this time, it is the belief of some scientists.

When we combine all the questions about this area, from personal need and experience, to systematic failure in the rationality underneath the opposing scientific explanations, and the reappearance of this dilemma in each new historical era, then the only logical, scientific position is agnosticism: that it is not possible, or may not be possible, to know.

Phil started with a strong, bold claim – that it’s “logically impossible” to find (dis)confirmatory evidence of many true and useful things. This has now been pared back to a weak and shaky claim – that it’s more congenial to hang out with people who share our unchallenged assumptions than to check whether the outside world matches our theorising.

I find the parallels with religious arguments amusing. The only reason religious people claim this stuff is a “metaphor” is because it’s been debunked. If Jesus came down from heaven tomorrow and started healing the sick and raising the dead for real, Christians would not be saying that this disproves Christianity because it’s only meant to be a metaphor! It’s the Two-Step of Triviality all over again.

@212

“You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn’t rational.”

–Dr. Rance, in
Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw (1969)

@ 213 “The only reason religious people claim this stuff is a ‘metaphor’ is because it’s been debunked.”

No, it’s because religious truths are often best expressed in figurative and evocative language much like poetry and other forms of “knowing” and “seeing.” This is one reason some philosophers, for example, turn to literature and the arts, believing there to be “truths” that are not well-expressed or conveyed with literal language or in the terms of conventional philosophical discourse. Metaphors may also help us see the “limits” of reason and appreciate precisely why Pascal said “the heart has its reasons….” Indeed, metaphors may persuade and compel with regard to their topical domain in a way that syllogisms and deductions rarely do (nor perhaps were ever meant to do). Moreover, metaphorical discourse is open to various levels or layers of interpretation and meaning and thus can show some sensitivity to the experiential, cognitive, and affective capacities and differences among its readers or listeners, closer to the spoken word in intimate settings. For more on metaphor (and analogy too!), see here (the second half of the paper): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1804987

Why is Cage’s solution germane? Because something very interesting may be happening, in part of the method of science.

I have to start with a formal identity: Contexts-over-distinctions are formally equivalent to institutions-over-transactions. (I tried to show this graphically in New Chart, for Descartes.)

In other words institutions are social contexts that are invented to cover one thing or another. But if the creation of new contexts is free and non-algorithmic in nature, then it will sometimes look like a new belief, or a social agreement upon belief.

So then, let’s take a real-world problem: At the same time, on the other hand, some problems in the real world, such as climate change, are evermore threatening, yet precisely unpredictable for scientific reasons or failures in rationality (e.g. due to the fact that n-compartment systems or n-body systems are not deterministically predictive; there are non-linear equations and the results depend upon where you start the calculations, etc., plus problems in modeling, variable measurement, experimental repetition to verify the models, etc.)

Yet we know that some things are inductively true about complex systems such as the climate. We just can’t quite predict the occurences accurately: (1) systems oscillate within parameters; (2) after brief perturbations they usually return to within parameters; (3) they occasionally change violently, a catastrophe; (4) the probability of catastrophe INCREASES with continuous forcing or introduced exotics. Etc. This is science, but it remains at the level of inductive observations.

It may be true, therefore, that the scientifically-required and scientifically-proper response to the danger of climate change is the free creation of a new institution by which everyone agrees (or mostly everyone agrees, by a vote) to take precautionary action. A non-algorithmic response. I think Murray Gell-Mann called for “the moral equivalent of belief” in his book The Quark and the Jaguar.

I find it interesting that very few of the defences of Christianity I’ve come across actually require God to exist.

220

The i without a dot is a different letter than the i with a dot in Turkish. It has a different sound. It is also considered a different letter by e-mail. I had to change my password in 2000 in Ankara so that I could access my e-mail. I couldn’t figure out how to get an i with a dot.

Phil started with a strong, bold claim – that it’s “logically impossible” to find (dis)confirmatory evidence of many true and useful things.

Actually Phil started out by saying

“You can’t find the Holy Spirit with an ammeter; you can’t find class consciousness or the Husserlian epoche that way, either.”

It was ajay who introduced the “logically impossible”, and I’m still not sure what work the ‘logically’ is doing.

That aside, I don’t believe I’ve backed down or changed my argument. My point all along has been that God isn’t an empirically testable proposition, and neither is the Kantian categorical imperative or the emergence of the proletariat as a class-for-itself or the maximisation of subjective utility. I believe that people who find it useful to talk in terms of proletarian self-awareness could in principle find common ground with people who talk in terms of rational utility maximisation, given a lot of work and good will on both sides; I also believe that in practice that conversation tends never to happen, for good reasons. I don’t think religious belief is any different.

And yes, that does commit me to believing that common ground could be found between people who find it useful to talk in terms of God and people who talk in terms of a Godless universe, given a lot of work and good will on both sides. In practice, of course, that’s a conversation that really doesn’t tend to happen.

In fact, common ground is found every single day between people who find it useful to talk in terms of God and people who talk in terms of a Godless Universe, given no particular work or good will on either side, as long as what we are talking about is the price of fish, or the best economic policy, or what’s wrong with that software package.

Anything, basically, except God (or the experience of mercy in the workings of the Universe as perceived through internal emotional reflection etc. etc.)

@rootless_e , 156

Since these neoconservatives were largely of secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this – along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even tactical politics, to attract religious supporters

The way some people here are talking about religion makes it sound like a noble lie one tells oneself. If you’ve already decided what actions and emotions would be the right ones to do and feel, then you try to believe something that makes you feel the emotions that cause you perform those actions. You start saying and doing your best to mean the whole of your new creed.

Which I suppose is reasonable–as they say, “would you rather be right or happy?” Still, I wish advanced practioners in this form of mind-rewiring were more careful in asking others to follow them. Christianity is a dangerous tool for amateurs–the experience of Substance McGravitas@71 is familiar to me. And the professional advice one gets in this industry isn’t particularly trustworthy, either.

Consumatopia 10.08.12 at 10:41 pm

The “noble lie” is from Strauss’s doctrine of why it is ok to lie to the marks. (someone said the ex-Trot Neocons went from “Religion is the opium of the people” to “Religion is the opium of the people, let’s get them stoned and sell them into slavery”. ) One can find a very similar doctrine about lying among the right wing religious nuts covered in Sharlett’s brilliant book The Family.

In my experience neither charlatanism nor sales based on fear are specific to religion. However I am sympathetic to the hostility that cult escapists feel towards religion.

Way too much here, and too many discussions going on in parallel, to be able to address even just 10% of everything.

Hidari @205:

I think that rationalism vs anti-rationalism is much more of a divide here than materialism vs anti-materialism. Certainly I see the New Atheists as having more in common with Rationalist Christians (e.g. Descartes, Newton) than with anti-rationalist materialists (Sartre, Nietzsche).

And I think that is actually a very good observation. Yes, the major problems the New Atheists have with religion is that it is actively anti-rational by design. If presented with unassailable evidence for the existence of god, most of them would concede the existence of god, because that would be the rational thing to do.

(With the following caveats: They still would not consider such a god to be worthy of worship – it did create a reality that is abhorrently cruel and wasteful, after all. And at least PZ Myers has publicly declared that there is nothing that would convince him of the existence of gods because they cannot possibly exist. The argument runs, simplified, like this: Can your god do logically impossible things? Yes – that is not logically possible, try again. No – well, then your god cannot do anything that a sufficiently advanced alien civilization could not also do, in principle. In fact, your god probably is just a sufficiently advanced alien lifeform, and thus does not deserve the name god.)

But what bugs me about this whole discussion thread is that the insistence on rationality is somehow considered by many to be unreasonable, intolerant, oppressive, naive, etc., instead of (please take the time to think that through for a moment) the absolute minimum requirement for having any productive dialogue at all.

Which brings me to this weird side discussion about how the new atheists are all rightists. First, that is simply incorrect – spend an hour on freethoughtblogs and judge for yourself. Second, even if it were true, so what? If all warmongering conservatives believed that the sky is blue, and all nice and friendly progressives insisted that it is yellow, would Hidari claim that blue is now suspect as the correct answer? Tribalism at its best. Third, as for the observation that atheists a few decades back used to be leftist, and now there is an increasing number of self-declared rationalists that don’t identify as leftist, maybe the possibility should be considered that it is the left that has changed, and not the rationalists.

Certainly traditional Marxists had their ideological blinders, but they at least claimed that they were rational and that their claims about history and the economy were objectively and demonstrably true. Notably, Marx did not sit down and write about narratives and deconstruction, but he marshalled historical and economic data to support his propositions, whatever we may think about them. Some traditional leftists had the all too human tendency to cherry pick the science they liked and reject the one they didn’t (Lysenko is particularly nasty example), but they were very much in favour of scientific and technological progress as such. There was never any doubt to them that human rights are universal, and that people are humans first, and females or Sikhs or Americans second. And, of course, they promoted atheism.

These days? Not so much, and my interpretation is that this is a holdover from postmodernism. As beautifully in evidence in this thread, it is now very easy indeed to find a self-declared leftist who will proclaim that we cannot really know anything (how do you know that then?), that rationality has failed (how can you defend that claim without referring to rationality?), that progress is an arrogant Western concept (yes, because nobody outside of Western civilization ever wanted to figure out how to heal diseases, produce more food or achieve the same work in less time), and that it is a-okay to sell the opiate of the masses if it just makes the masses happy with their lot. And then there is this, the most nauseating consequence of this stance taken to its logical conclusion.

I guess a point is that many religions (in particular the ones New Atheists most concerned with) sure seem to be making fairly concrete non-metaphorical claims about the nature of reality which seem like the sort of thing which seem entirely within the realm of reason to address. For instance, the idea that there was a guy two thousand years ago who preached and attracted a small following of devotees, who would periodically go around performing miraculous feats, until finally he topped it all off by returning from the dead after he was crucified and then ascended into heaven. This isn’t some abstract statement about the nature of morality and meaning in the universe, this is very concrete: either the guy did these things or he didn’t. And then it seems to make sense for rationalistic atheists to pop up and say “no, he probably didn’t.”

Of course, squishy metaphor is mixed up with this, in one sense since people who believe Jesus did these things think it represents more ineffable truths about the nature of existence than merely some peculiar events that happened in Roman Judea, and in another sense that some Christians are willing to say that these things may not have literally happened at all, but that the metaphor itself what really matters. But to the extent that religions do seem to be dealing in the world of the concrete and the natural, then New Atheists seem to be trying to focus on that side of religion. (Although they have a habit of sloppily conflating the concrete and metaphorical sides of religion often.)

So to all the people defending religion as a collection of stories of moral behaviours, why is it that John Milton, Rashi, the Pope, and probably half the defenders of Christianity on this blog all disagree about Genesis and the lessons it holds about human nature? Doesn’t this suggest that we need a bit more then stories? What about the role of religious practice? Does psychotherapy now replace religion, Woody Allen the new Mother Theresa?

Or is it a bit like Ren Faire and other cultural preservation activities?

Scott Martens:

Every person I know who claims to be a scientist believes – and indeed treasures – the notion that all phenomena in the universe obey fixed, material, causal, absolute laws that account for them. … Yet, not one shred of evidence for this claim exists, nor, in all likelihood, can it. Indeed, the actual behavior of scientists – the way they behave in their everyday lives where random and unexpected events are expected at every turn – makes far more sense if you deny that claim.

Right, exactly. The statement “You should accept scientific claims about material reality” is not, itself, a scientific claim about material reality.

Me:

“religion” is really just that domain of culture in which we are conscious of ourselves as conscious, rational beings existing in a moral universe.

reason:

This seems to me completely wrong way around. Surely we are moral creatures (not always rational) living in an amoral universe.

Well, the thing is, both are true. Before there were human beings — presumably before there were any rational beings — there was a physical universe evolving according to physical law. And, before you or I are capable of holding or asserting any belief about the physical universe, we exist as conscious beings in a discursive universe. It might be nice if the world — that is, the totality of facts, not things — was arranged in a clear logical hierarchy so that the relationship of “more fundamental” was strictly transitive. But the topology of truths is more complex than that. Facts about the physical world don’t reduce to facts about our existence as free, conscious beings; and facts about our existence as free conscious beings don’t reduce to facts about the physical world. Or perhaps better, each reduces to the other.

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

Going through some of this thread reminded me of
this obit of Wm Hamilton from last March.

Seth @231 — To make a sociological observation (for lack of a better phrase), I think there’s a lot of room on the spectrum between Jeffersonian deism and Biblical literalism.

One the one hand, Jefferson’s flavor of deism seemed to embrace Jesus the moral philosopher, while rejecting the supernatural aspects of the Gospels. I’m thinking specifically of the Jefferson Bible and the motivation behind it. On the other hand, C.S. Lewis tried to ‘forbid’ us from accepting this demystified version of Jesus, arguing (for example in Mere Christianity, quoted here) that Jesus was either a crazy liar or the “Son of God” (whatever precisely that meant to Lewis).

A lot of the hostility to Christianity from the more secular folks these days, I think stems from the way the most vocal Christians largely follow C.S. Lewis’ rather arbitrary dictation about what the religion has to mean to a believer. They are aggressively reading anyone out of the church who has a problem with the supernatural. I don’t think a scientifically literate person could possibly be an ‘unproblematic’ Christian by Lewis’ standard. But I can certainly relate to a compromise in which the ethical teachings of Jesus can retain a high moral authority without a heavy-handed rejection of any scientific arguments that call Biblical literalism into question.

Spufford calls this argument by CSL one of the most ridiculous that has ever been advanced, if my memory serves me correctly.

Hidari,

Now I don’t have the time to go through that entire thread with a comb, but this looks like equivocation. One is about the belief that humans are, actually, already and in real life, rational agents in the economic sphere, the other is about whether humans should aspire to exclusively use evidence and reason to infer what the world is like and to inform their decisions.

But I can certainly relate to a compromise in which the ethical teachings of Jesus can retain a high moral authority without a heavy-handed rejection of any scientific arguments that call Biblical literalism into question.

Russell: “Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching — an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates…”

Re Niamh:

Fair points all, and sorry for getting way off-track. I still think I just don’t get it though. I get the inescapable trials of living, the inability to confront them with one’s own individual resources; I entirely and completely agree with the “possibility [and necessity–js.] of obtaining help, forgiveness, comfort, courage” from others. I still think there’s some sort of giant jump when one starts talking about getting these things from a completely supernatural source, rather than, say, other human beings, a reasoned faith (in the sense of trust) in various human endeavors, etc. I guess I simply fail to see why acknowledging the possibility and necessity of relying on the help and forgiveness, etc., of others would so to speak automatically incline one to look beyond the world we actually inhabit.

And just to be clear, I’m with JW Mason in holding that the world we actually inhabit is utterly rife with moral facts that are irreducible to the language or methods of science. (Frankly, meta-ethics is one of my AOS’s, as they say in the trade, so I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about these questions.) But acknowledging the existence of these irreducible moral facts (also, other non-moral but irreducibly normative facts) still isn’t getting me any closer at all to acknowledging anything outside the human world.

Lee,

Have you tried that “religion is not a doctrine” approach where actual beliefs and commandments don’t matter on your average American mega-church, during a Friday prayer in Pakistan, at the wailing wall in Jerusalem, with Korean missionaries or during a mass in Sao Paolo? In some of these cases, you may want to position yourself next to a handy escape route before you start to make your pitch. And pretending that these billions of people don’t have the real religion but you and a few hundred liberal theologians have it… that is just defies description.

And still with the dehumanization of atheists. I do not have any need of religion, perhaps because my parents never indoctrinated one into me – am I therefore irrational, have I jumped outside of myself, whatever that means? I am just as human as you, and my feelings are not shallower than yours.

Have you tried that “religion is not a doctrine” approach where actual beliefs and commandments don’t matter on your average American mega-church, during a Friday prayer in Pakistan, at the wailing wall in Jerusalem, with Korean missionaries or during a mass in Sao Paolo?

Have you tried your “superstition, wishful thinking, blind allegiance to authority and tradition, herd mentality and gut feelings” approach? It seems to me that Lee’s approach would be a hell of a lot more acceptable – it would only require a couple of tweaks (“Brothers, I say to you that the most important part of being a Christian is the experience of something that actually takes place in human life…”).

And pretending that these billions of people don’t have the real religion but you and a few hundred liberal theologians have it…

Of course, Lee didn’t say they didn’t – nor did he dismiss billions of people as simple-minded unreflective rote-believers – but let that pass. How is that more arrogant than claiming that both the billions and the liberal theologians are flat wrong? You’re applying reason, of course – but so was Lee, and indeed Wittgenstein.

Alex SL:

on your average American mega-church, during a Friday prayer in Pakistan, at the wailing wall in Jerusalem, with Korean missionaries or during a mass in Sao Paolo

What about the average non-mega-church in Chorley? Or Norwich? Or South Shields? (Just naming places I’ve been to; I defer to everyone else’s greater experience with the US, the Middle East, The Middle East, some place with Koreans, and Brazil.)

Surely nobody in their right mind can argue that basing our worldview and communal decisions on superstition, wishful thinking, blind allegiance to authority and tradition, herd mentality and gut feelings is something to be promoted or welcomed?

I’m an academic in a STEM discipline in a run of the mill “Western” university. There’s rather a lot of all of those visible from where I’m standing…

(To forestall one tiresome line of riposte: though it depresses me to have to say this, I’m an atheist raised in a family of atheists. I’ve also worked briefly in a shelter run out of a church basement. There’s more to religion than epistemology or ontology… )

Phil:
People who believe in God think that a belief in God is a good way to orient your life. That doesn’t mean they don’t believe in science or rely on divine intervention to boil a kettle – it means they don’t believe that the fact that science works entails that a belief in God is not a good way to orient your life.

This seems an eminently sensible reading of things to me. I don’t think religion is synonymous with evangelism, otherwise the Muslims a few offices down the corridor would be bothering me with pamphlets, presumably, as would the local Church organizer at the far end of the corridor.

It looks as if the US is becoming more like Europe, at least in the places CTers are likely to hang out. The most striking finding in a recent Pew study is that “no affiliation” is now the largest single religious group in the Democratic support base, and that around 30 per cent of all 18-30s are in this group. So, if you’re a young liberal Democrat, it’s likely that you and most of your friends are unaffiliated, as would certainly be the case elsewhere in the world

http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx

Yes – if you believe that the subset of stories about Jesus preserved in the canonical Gospels (including John) are all true and accurate, except when they’re inconsistent with one another, and if you believe that there’s no possibility that Jesus was at any point speaking metaphorically, talking for effect or honestly mistaken, then the only possibilities that remain are that he was either insane or telling the truth. That’s what I call hermeneutics! Another form of the same argument I’ve come across was The Gospel writers all seem to think he was divine – are you saying they were all liars?

But that kind of point-blank literalism seems to find its mirror-image in some “new atheist” arguments, which start with a “category dismissal” and, inevitably, end there too. Can you persuade me your religion isn’t an irrational superstition? Only don’t bother me with the details of your religion, I already know it’s an irrational superstition.

Eagleton likewise uses a category dismissal on Dawkins: Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration.

And Eagleton says that this is an error since it ignores faith and transcendence and the Loch Ness monster.

Or something like that.

“[by supporting faith you have] …thrown away any argumentative tools that would enable one to convince a fundamentalist believer that their pure faith-based conviction that god wants homosexuals to die is wrong.”

If god doesn’t exist, whether or not homosexuals (or anyone else) should live or die is still up for grabs. In other words, you haven’t thrown anything away: you have to make the moral case whether or not you refer to god in your arguments.

Phil @226
“My point all along has been that God isn’t an empirically testable proposition,”

I’m sort of curious about this view. What God are you talking about here – is it by definition not testable? Or is it just that it exists outside the physical world and never systematically interferes with the real world. (So you are assuming a non-physical world exists). I mean there have been empirically tests made (for instance if prayer helps the sick – I think the answer is only if the sick no about it – so it is indistinguishable from human support).

Faith which wasn’t accompanied by the possibility of doubt wouldn’t be faith, it’d be (subjectively) certain knowledge – just as the belief that Christ rose from the dead wouldn’t be at all remarkable if we didn’t simultaneously hold the belief that resurrection from the dead is physically impossible.

As for what faith is, as I said at 83 I believe that religious practice comes first, the experience of collective reverence for the numinous second and commitment to factual propositions a slow & often troubled third – as if to say, if worshipping Jesus together with these people works as it clearly does (for me), then perhaps I should take what these people say about Jesus to be true, however impossible it seems. Saying that faith is wrong because it entails believing six impossible things before breakfast didn’t work on Tertullian and it doesn’t work much better now.

Phil, @268
I’m not sure whether your answer represents your own, or your interpretation of other people’s views, but for an intellectual it seems odd. Look at John Quiggin’s response to the CSL argument.

Think about for instance acupuncture. I might think acupuncture works without accepting all the mumbo jumbo (and proven mumbo-jumbo) about meridians. Because things are packaged together doesn’t mean that if one part is true all of it must be.

reason – it’s not my own way of thinking, but I think it could be; I think it’s a legitimate way of proceeding. But no, it doesn’t entail pulling a lever and switching from reasoned scepticism to unquestioning belief – far from it. CS Lewis’s argument is absurd (as I said myself up above) because he’s trying to use logic to substitute for a leap of faith, while also specifying how far the leap needs to reach. I much prefer the Bishop of Durham’s comments, cited above, that belief in a physical resurrection isn’t fundamental, because the resurrection was “more than a conjuring trick with bones”.

As for the acupuncture example, I think there’s a big difference between dipping into a social practice and committing to it. I suspect that anyone using traditional Chinese medicine on a regular basis and mixing with fellow users would rapidly start thinking there was something going on there. (Wrongly, AFAICS, but there you go.)

On the religious right, what I still don’t understand is why people who oppose them don’t concentrate on attacking them instead of attacking religion tout court. Broadening the fight like this seems like a distraction at best and counter-productive at worst – Gould was a Christian and a militant opponent of creationism, remember.

269:This. And my feeling is that much, if not most paganism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were ritual and “practice religions” for most of their history. And remain so for most people. In some cases, profession (confession) of dogma is part of the practice.

Let’s say I throw salt over my left shoulder after spilling it. When asked, I say it prevents bad luck. When asked if I “really believe that” I say no. When asked again why I do it, I say it prevents bad luck. Poor rationalists are spinning like tops but I’m ok fine.

Historicizing when religion and “faith” as what, some kind of personal individual self-perception as a subject in relation to a proposition or set of propositions would be interesting, since I think it is an early modern phenomenon and precisely coincident with the rise of “science.”

The question from me for the fervent is “Why so serious?” And I am something of a Nietzschean, existentialist, and yes nihilist in that the justifications of actions are nearly irrelevant compared to the actions themselves. People waste so much time justifying, as if some Nobodaddy was grading them on their consequentialist arguments instead of on their kindness.

To this and all the other arguments along the lines of rationalism fails to provide this or that with 100% certainty: Okay, maybe that is so in some of the cases. But then the conclusion should be, “we don’t know because nobody knows because there is no way to know”, and not, “now let’s listen to what the theologian of this arbitrarily privileged sect claims to know based on his metaphorical interpretation of a bronze age myth.”
—

Nobody is asking you to listen to anyone’s theology. We’re simply objecting to your Victorian Era misunderstanding of science and your philistine mockery of other people’s beliefs. I’m particularly appalled by the crassness of this repeated “bronze age myth” gibberish. You may not be able to appreciate the sexual poetry of the Song of Solomon or grasp the moral insights about power in Isaiah or Judges, or even appreciate Handel’s Messiah, or Gilgamesh, or the Chronicles of the Han Historian, but that seems like illiteracy, not evidence of enlightenment.

BTW: since the 1850s, science has become a lot less enamored of the simple clockwork universe beloved by some Victorians. We know know that mathematics can’t be completely formalized, that big parts of physics seem to be knowable only via probabilities, that individual consciousness is not an atomic complete thing, and that the way we think is often far from rational. This is not mysticism or “post-modernism”, it’s science.

“Iraq war aside..”

Well, perhaps not completely aside:

“Saddam Hussein was, both as a secularist and a tyrant, widely despised in the Muslim world prior to the American invasion; and yet the reactions of most Muslims revealed that no matter what his crimes against the Iraqi people, against the Kuwaitis, and against the Iranians, the idea of an army of infidels occupying Baghdad simply could not be countenanced, no matter what humanitarian purpose it might serve.“

You may not be able to appreciate the sexual poetry of the Song of Solomon or grasp the moral insights about power in Isaiah or Judges, or even appreciate Handel’s Messiah, or Gilgamesh, or the Chronicles of the Han Historian, but that seems like illiteracy, not evidence of enlightenment.

Look, this is plain horseshit. You’re talking here about appreciation of art, not of religion, and there is plenty of it among those do not countenance the kinds of claims for religion that you’ve been making.. Christ, there’s even been great religious art created by known unbelievers, eg. the Requiem Masses of Berlioz, Brahms, and Verdi.

We know know that mathematics can’t be completely formalized…

nitpick
You mean there are true mathematical statements that can’t be proven under powerful enough systems of arithmetic.
/nitpick

… that individual consciousness is not an atomic complete thing

Not sure what you’re saying here.

Perhaps a different situation the CT crowd can better relate to … I know a lot of role-players from perfectly rational scientific backgrounds – scientists, engineers, programmers, economists – who still subscribe to the gambler’s fallacy, have lucky dice, have particular dice they cling to, or change dice when they’re having a bad run. This would be bad enough if the game were purely random, but it’s not: I’m the GM and anyone with any sense knows that I’m fudging shit left, right and centre. But they still put all those superstitions into play. This is cross-cultural too: Japanese gamers do it too, even though they’re actually quite sophisticated gamblers (at least, my mob were).

Yet another example: I’ve met almost zero people in my life who can properly balance risk. During Japan’s triple disaster, almost every foreigner in Tokyo did a runner, heading west or heading overseas, out of fear of radiation. A significant proportion of those people fleeing were either a) driving, or b) smokers. I recently had a friend ask me if the sea south of Tokyo was safe for surfing – but he drives to the coast. Yet he’s worried about radiation 300km from the nuclear plant.

Do we judge these people to be immature or incapable of basic analysis? If you go onto any leftwing blog you’ll have difficulty convincing a sizable proportion of its atheists that the risk assessments described above are wrong – because ooooo, radiation.

Pretty much everyone on earth is loaded down with superstitions. The reason that Xtianity is special is not its belief system, but its particularly fucked history of abuse of temporal power. But that history isn’t, first and foremost, due to the religion itself. And atheist aggro about the religion needs to recognize that.

I think rootless_e is proposing a sort of God of the Gaps: There are true mathematical statements that can’t be proven, therefore Jesus. Physics is only knowable via probabilities, so the Council of Trent. Individual consciousness is not atomic, which leaves room for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

How cool would it be if individual consciousness was atomic, though, and I was the first one to learn to control it and shoot Gamma ray lasers out my ears?

nitpick! Complain to David Hilbert, not me.

I mean that the Descartian notion of a conscious being has been shown to be a mythological construct, and that what we think we are thinking and why is often (most likely) some wrong post-hoc excuse. Our lives are careening pub crawls from delusion to delusion between brief moments of logic while all the elements we think of as “self” evolve without conscious control or knowledge. At least that’s what it feels like this morning.

278 “Consciousness is a disease. ”

Galápagos!

“It is hard to believe nowadays that people could ever have been as brilliantly duplicitous as James Wait–until I remind myself that just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn’t imagine and execute.

So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogram brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?

A second query: What source was there back then, save for our overelaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hearing about simply everywhere?

My answer: There was no other source. This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

Niamh:

JJ, js, and a number of others: I really don’t think that you are writing about what Spufford means by religion, or God, at all, even if you wish he did.

I suppose I should be included in the “others” here. With due respect, I disagree. I think those of us taking the Durkheim-Weber-Marx-William James view of religion do have essentially the same conception of that Spufford does. Which I would summarize as: (1) Our existence as moral and social beings poses real, profound and unavoidable questions, which cannot be answered in terms of material reality and by science; (2) religion is a valid attempt to answer those questions, as opposed to an invalid attempt to answer questions about the material world (to the extent it seems to be the latter, it’s because metaphorical language has been misinterpreted, or because the religion has degenerated into superstition); and (3) religion is not only or mainly a set of propositions, but practices, collective identity, and feelings or experiences.

There’s a difference in language that comes from the fact that Spufford is looking at religion from the inside, while most (all?) of us on this thread are looking at it from the outside. But I don’t think the difference matters much. In AA, they like to say that “god” means “group of drunks.” That’s purely Durkeimian language. But it doesn’t in any way conflict with an awareness of the “trials of living that come to everyone in one form or another, including really tough experiences that test you to your limits and beyond,” still less with “the possibility of obtaining help, forgiveness, comfort, courage and so on, from outside your own resources.”

JW Mason @ 294

I’m getting close to the end of Unapologetic — not all the way through, mind, so maybe I should state this provisionally: As far as I can tell, Spufford’s account of the purpose his religious faith serves for him, and Marx’s description of the purpose religious faith serves for people-in-general are virtually identical. All that’s different is the plus or minus sign accorded them by their authors. (I smell a little Nietzsche in the quote by Marx, too, which I suspect Spufford would consider arrogance. It would be nice if Spufford himself would drop by and set us all straight — or at least try to. Even if a significant number of commenters would still slink away muttering, I myself would like to hear from him.)

Lee A. Arnold, you wrote “If you insist that religion is not the answer, you had better have an alternative ready. ” You did not present any demand symmetric to this for those who insist that religion is the answer–that they deal with the problems created by religion.

Other than that. I don’t disagree with what you wrote @296. Only the asymmetry–if you believe that an institution makes the world worse more often than it makes things better then you need not present an alternative.

(Note that I personally am not asserting that religion makes the world worse or better).

@hannah 299
“The choice is between that and pure mechanism.”

The choice is between a concept of morals and rights, and a concept of mechanics. There is no inherent reason that the concept of moral and rights should be religious; in facts, I think that “religion” is a way to muddle the descriptive approach to the world [mechanichs] whith the normative/moral one.

LFC @242

“…I think there’s a lot of room on the spectrum between Jeffersonian deism and Biblical literalism.”

Yes they are ‘poles’ or endpoints on a spectrum. But I don’t know that there are a lot of logically consistent points along it. What would such a point be? “Yes I believe Jesus walked on water, but not that he turned water into wine?” Or do we distinguish among various metaphorical interpretations of the supernatural incidents? So where Jefferson was extreme by literally cutting them out of the text, a more moderate position would provide clever metaphorical readings of each such incident. Would each interpretation constitute a really different position? (Maybe so, if they started using those distinctions as pretexts for political fights — think homoousian v. homoiousian.)

Politically, of course, there are many intermediate positions. Just like there are lots of Republican anti-feminists who would take umbrage if any of the rights that strident feminists in earlier generations earned for them were about to be taken away (except perhaps abortion rights). People who ought logically to take Jefferson’s view might “deny him” (taking after St Peter) because they don’t want to take the heat for openly defending the real implications of a non-literal reading.

Seth
“Just like there are lots of Republican anti-feminists who would take umbrage if any of the rights that strident feminists in earlier generations earned for them were about to be taken away (except perhaps abortion rights).”

So long as it isn’t their daughter with an unwanted pregnancy.

faustusnotes @285
It is well known that people have problems with probabilistic events. It seems our brains are causality seeking machines. The point being we should in this day and age have learnt to be skeptical of our natural tendencies, intelligent people like Spufford more than anybody.

But this explaination of superstition being the result of our causality bias, IS exactly what the new atheists are saying. It seems odd for a critic of them pointing it out.

JW Mason @ 308

Agree with you completely about the workings of Spufford’s humane intelligence. And what a miraculous writer he is into the bargain! I consider both of the books of his that I’ve read a real blessing, and I’m grateful to CT for pulling my coat to him. Also, JanieM’s reminder of Stewart Brand and the WEC brings back a lot of memories. Although I was always more of a Marxist (informal, non-Stalinist, in case any of DeLong’s liberal shock troops are listening in) than a back-to-the-land Utopian, I, and the friends of my misspent youth, used to read the WEC the way Nebraska sodbusters probably once read the Sears Roebuck catalog. A pleasant memory.

@312–We already know all this stuff, and we didn’t even have to read this thread! Try it the other way, since that is the basis of the complaint: 1) Name a way in which modern science is proposing to replace the functions of religion in any comprehensive manner. 2) Then, defend it. Address things like: Writing prescriptions for psych drugs like candy. Assumption of no long-term effects. Over-diagnosing attention deficit disorder among children. Requirements, competence, and monitoring of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. What the intellectual scientific framework of shrinkage really consists of. Location of ecstatic or transcendent experience in the discipline. How you propose to pay for it all.

Try it the other way, since that is the basis of the complaint: 1) Name a way in which modern science is proposing to replace the functions of religion in any comprehensive manner.

Okay: it isn’t and it doesn’t matter, especially where people have enough security to do the things they like to do. Where I live fewer and fewer people believe and…they do other things, although I have to say faith in the local team is also a problem.

I think it’s great so many people have found this thread to be interesting and have been willing to contribute to it. I’m glad that, on the whole, it’s been really positive, across the variety of views and opinions that’ve been expressed.
Quite a few people have wanted to talk about faith and reason, or faith vs reason, and have raised questions about the nature of truth claims, and what the different kinds of judgment might be that we bring to bear to bear on different kinds of experiences and activities. I have really enjoyed the range of ideas expressed here, from those wishing to assert the primacy of scientific method in establishing sound knowledge, to those who raise questions about the starting point of any form of understanding.
But I was thinking about JW Mason’s point about convergences in explanation of religious ideas (295), and I imagine Spufford would think that it makes a big difference whether you view them from the outside or the inside.
After all, the point of his book is about the ’emotional sense’ that Christianity can make.
I thought of saying something about the connection between ideas and what they mean in how a life is actually lived, but sure Wittgenstein says it better than I could, so why would I even try? I have no idea if Spufford would like this quote, but it seems quite relevant to me:

‘… one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life)… It says that wisdom is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold. The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you: you can follow it as you would a doctor’s prescription. –But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction… Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.’

@Hannah “Art”, not “art”.

The claims about Art criticised in Art, an Enemy of The People, are very similar to those made by most religions, namely that there is a special category of people (prophets or artists) and a special category of activities (Religion or Art) which yield transcendent insights into the human condition, and which should be accorded special privileges over other people and other ways of finding meaning and enjoyment in life.

As I said above, I don’t have a problem with people finding meaning in an experience they call God, or if they find it in Mozart. But if they find it in cooking, I’m cool with that too.

About 2/3rds of Canadians

It varies from place to place. My province has the highest percentage of nonbelievers, my city’s percentage is higher. But still, if even 33% of the people have no religion and we aren’t, uh, going crazy except for hockey games I’d say that the example of non-religion being fine is pretty strong. There’s a church for sale near my house, another beautiful one got turned into condos, and I don’t see a whole lot of replacing going on. (Obviously people can still be religious without those structures, but…I bet the meaning of that changes.)

My mom goes to a squishy church like Spufford and my daughter was an angel in the Christmas play there and had a great time. When that church stops being what it is – it’s not so full and there’s a lot of grey hair – there will be something else for people to do.

The outside / inside dichotomy might be applied differently depending on whether you think the stress, in the OP title — Francis Spufford and the inner life of belief — should be placed on “belief” or “inner life”.

The very notion that the individual might have an inner experience — inalienable, subjective, private and owned — of which she needs to make sense, and which might, despite its seeming material inaccessibility to shared social observation, contain both a longing for, and a means of connection to the whole, of which the individual is an ephemeral part, whether that “whole” is a family, a society, a political state, a living planet or a universe, . . . seems curiously remote from the problems of political deliberation or ethical behavior.

Like others in the thread, I am troubled by the religious grasping at arbitrarily chosen, and apparently loosely held, “beliefs”, and using passionate “faith” in those supposed “beliefs” as a cudgel with which to bully others in various political disputes, or as a personal dispensation from personal shame or ethical responsibility. Putting those resentments against religion aside, the honoring of personal, inner experience, intrigues me.

It does seem to me that we, human beings, long for meaning, and struggle with an inner chaos of unordered impulses, response and experience, a dream world, we’d like to control, order and (contradictorily) free and express. I sometimes make the point in comments, that political arguments often take the form, not of a logical proposition like a syllogism, but of an hypnotic trance induction. We long to be hypnotized, to put aside our rationalizing, defensive consciousness; and, in persuading others, we instinctively play on this longing to be, literally, open to ideas and values.

If I come to the aid and comfort of a friend, who has experienced a tragedy or an accident, I don’t offer scientific analysis. I offer reassurance, touting “beliefs” which are objectively false as factual propositions, but are, nonetheless, aimed at repairing the person’s healthy narcissism. I am thinking of commonplace nonsense, like, “you are so lucky that the accident was not so much worse . . . ” It is important to hear that you are “lucky” — most especially, when you have been confronted with incontrovertible evidence that you are not — that you belong, that you are part of the whole, that you have as much right and purpose in being here, as the rocks, and the daffodils and the bugs and the stars.

We do a lot of this seeking after inner comfort and transcendant meaning, and not just in formally religious settings. I suppose that this is what people are mostly doing in a Tony Robbins seminar. It is why a business executive reads the Harvard Business Review. Maybe, following Aristotle, it is what we find in a great tragic drama. Or, what people seek, and sometimes, find in mind-altering drugs; or at AA meetings. It is what people want from magic or thinking about ESP and extra-terrestrials, or from sexual intercourse. It is what the coach is providing the team every day in practice, and in a pre-game pep talk.

I have listened to religious people, struggle with the concepts, say, of Darwinian evolution, and sense that their concern is that they are being asked to give up some necessary element of a favorite fairy tale, which has helped them find meaning or motivation in the necessary disciplining of their scarier impulses. They really don’t have to do molecular genetics or cure cancer (where factual and theoretical beliefs about evolution might have some purchase), but they do have to refrain from cheating their employers or killing their mother-in-laws, and hide their fear of being cheated by their employers or being killed by their mother-in-laws. If the universe doesn’t have an inherent moral structure of natural law and an all-observing God, well, then how can we justify ethical self-restraint in ourselves or expect ethical self-restraint from strangers?

I’m not always sure what the point would be in engaging people on the factualness of religious belief. I was raised in a Catholic tradition, which, following Thomas Aquinas, regards religious faith as focused on propositions, which are beyond factual refutation or confirmation, by definition. Of course, the bullying — exemplified by claims of papal infallibility — is front and center, as well. And, then there’s the hypocrisy — if that’s even the right word, for the disowned emergence of the darkest impulses — of sexual molestation or Mother Theresa making nice with the dictators of Haiti. The pragmatic case for religious belief or practice seems curiously difficult to put — the bridge to ethics or politics a mirage in the desert’s shimmering distance.

The “emotional sense” Spufford is speaking of is this is the only real power religion has to “persuade” anyone that there is “personal or benign” meaning in the universe. Why we modern humans are throwing out the “emotional sense” of religion along with its obvious historical baggage is what I think Spufford is giving a good hard look at. And if we do throw this out, is there something fundamental we are missing that a belief in science cant provide ? I look forward to reading his book and would hope the new atheists would read the book and ask themselves what “emotional sense” can we provide to our believers.

Shorter Spufford: “I, like everyone else, find it psychologically healthy — nay, unavoidable– to use metaphors when reviewing and dealing with many parts of my everyday life. Like everyone, I use metaphors in concrete ways when trying to apply them. I, and many, many others, select some of my metaphors from one of those loose bundles of same called religions. Here’s how that works for me.”

Shorter Crooked Timber commentariat: [comprehensively misses the point.] Most take Spufford’s book for a dog whistle. Psychological public health, alternate ways and means of ensuring, are undiscussed. (Yes, I saw the mention of drugs.) “The pragmatic case for religious belief … seems … difficult to put.” Sheesh! Epistemic closure anyone?

I posted this earlier but I don’t think the post went through.

It’s a rather serendipitous blog post from NewApps (I blame divine intervention) on religious beliefs as facts vs as preferences.

Surprise surprise, we actually have *facts* about how people tend to view religious beliefs.

I’ll quote:

“In sum, concerning matters of religion, the participants were not entirely subjectivist or entirely objectivist, but intuitively regarded such beliefs to fall somewhere in between subjective preference and objective knowledge of facts. These results conform well with Paul Harris’ earlier research on how children regard religious testimony. Even young children (age 5) seem to think that religious testimony is different from factual testimony. They are, for instance, more confident that germs exist than that angels exist (even religious children), despite the fact that both are invisible, and that both are learned about through testimony.”

Some other relevant speculative points:

“Attempts to incorporate fictionalism into religious practice, such as the Anglican Sea of Faith, have met only with limited success.”

“It would be interesting to replicate Heiphetz et al.’s study with people from rather isolated, religious communities, like the Amish. My prediction is that people from such communities would regard religious beliefs as more fact-like than preference-like.”

“I think that this understanding of religious beliefs as not entirely fact-like is a recent development in western culture, of say, the past 200-300 years.”

http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/10/religious-beliefs-matter-of-fact-or-of-preference.html

And a tackle in football still hurts.

One does plenty of real things while participating in fictions.

Feels like this post invokes (provokes) a lifetime of reading to do (good thing). Might I suggest Kenneth Burke? (god-terms as omni-present, the condition of thinking/knowing/being)
I’d just go for lots of “literary” texts, but I don’t want to seem to be invoking ART. Rational engineers marrying “intuitive” women. All that. Tedious.
Now, having set aside Horace, to return to Carl Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. (Which is what matters. We’re all always already fielding, aren’t we? When we’re not at the plate.)
I also love the smell of waxed pews. Go figure. Play ball.

I don’t know what relevance this has to the specıfıcs of the debate, although there are obvıous lınks to the Wittgenstein quote and the debate about whether relıgıon ıs best seen as a belıef system or a “famıly” of shared socıal practıces, but I should poınt out that there ıs a bıg debate about what the word “faıth” actually means ın Chrıstıanıty. It’s certaınly true that one ınterpretatıon ıs what one mıght term the “orthodox” vıew ıe “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”; ıe for that whıch we don’t have logıcal or scıentıfıc evıdence, we ‘have’ faıth. And thıs ıs generally how the New Atheısts ınterpret ıt.

But another vıew ıs that the actual Greek word “pi’stis” ıs best translated as “faithfulness” ınstead. In other words ıt has stronger connotatıons of commıtment and a socıal bond. Sımılar to when your husband-wıfe asks you “have you been faıthful to me” s/he ıs not askıng whether s/he belıeves s/he exısts or not. It’s a statement of a socıal bond or commıtment. And obvıously dıfferent schools of Chrıstıanıty have dıfferent vıews about thıs.

So the seemıng antınomy between faıth and reason mıght not be as strong as people thınk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_in_Christianity

they found the notion of powerful witches doing Satan’s work, plausible enough to motivate legal proceedings and lethal penalties.

I read an account of the witchcraft hysteria ago that I found quite compelling, which unfortunately I can’t now track down. Anyway, the argument was that the rational core of witchcraft trials was the breakdown of village solidarity.

Traditionally, people had felt a strong obligation to support members of the community unable to provide for themselves, typically meaning elderly widows. In the early modern period, the opening-up of village economies and spread of acquisitive individualism made it harder to sustain these norms. But people’s actual behavior and sense of how they ought to behave did not change in sync, and so even as people now found good reason not to share their harvest with the widow down the road, on some level they still “knew” they ought to. The resulting feelings of discomfort and guilt they very reasonably attributed tot the widow, since after all if she weren’t doing *something* (even just sitting around being hungry) the feelings wouldn’t exist. It is then a very short step from “because of some real but invisible tie between me and this old woman, I am experiencing something bad” to “this old woman is invisibly doing something bad to me.” And then to accuse her of witchcraft.

This has the ring of truth to me. There’s no one we hate as much as the person we know we have wronged, and it’s the most natural thing int he world to hypostatize that knowledge into an attack by them on us.

On the other hand, if you look at the Malleus Maleficarum (time-sink warning: it’s weirdly fascinating) you will find lots of scenarios like, I realized my daughter was a witch when I couldn’t stop having sexual thoughts about her. So while I feel confident that much if not all of historical belief in witchcraft was based on assigning moral responsibility for men’s emotional responses to women to those women, and then treating their responsibility as criminal, and, superstitiously, as a material fact, the emotions involved were evidently broader than village solidarity.

What I don’t believe is that people were more irrational in 1600 and are less irrational today. After all, it’s barely 20 years since we in the US were arresting and imprisoning people on hardly more plausible charges of satanic rituals.

Hidari, your comment:

“It’s certaınly true that one ınterpretatıon ıs what one mıght term the “orthodox” vıew ıe “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”; ıe for that whıch we don’t have logıcal or scıentıfıc evıdence, we ‘have’ faıth. And thıs ıs generally how the New Atheısts ınterpret ıt.”

I would not characterize the “orthodox” view of Hebrews 11:1 as a commitment to non-rational, science-defying hope. It’s not as if orthodoxy retroactively defined itself to accomodate the Enlightenment’s territorialization of Reason. Most believers have a reason or two for believing what they do, even if they aren’t formalized for others to debate. And orthodoxy doesn’t throw Aquinas out the window.

That said, I agree with your second definition and it’d be good if people incorporated it into their discussions more. Thank you.

Addendum: Another metaphor suggests itself, oddly enough a biblical one. We have indeed eaten from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Ain’t no going back after that, I think. Not really, and no amount of sound and fury can make it otherwise, although a general amnesia might.

GiT @#331 quotes (from somewhere): “I think that this understanding of religious beliefs as not entirely fact-like is a recent development in western culture, of say, the past 200-300 years.”

In some parts of western culture, such as my brain, it never developed at all.

Back when I was “religious”, I believed in God in exactly same way I believed in Australia and Santy Claus, and for the same reason: people I had reason to trust told me they existed. I later decided they were wrong about God, right about Australia and kidding about Santy.

But it never occurred to me to wonder if Australia was really just a facet of my existential reaction to the law of gravity and emotional engagement with kangaroos as a symbol that gravity can be (very temporarily) overcome by going “boingggg!”.

@Bruce Wilder 338, JW Mason 341

Some time ago I read “The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe”, by B. Levack.
Some interesting notions I got from the book are that:

a) the actual witch-hunts happened mostly during the wars between Catholics and Protestants, and mostly in those part of Europe where there was a patchwork of Protestants and Catholics. Spain, for example, was fully Catholic, and had no witch-hunt. Italy had only one witch-hunt, and during the repression of the Waldensians (or some other heresy, I don’t remember). In central Europe, between France and Germany, there was a patchwork of Protestants, witch-hunting was a bipartisan common hobby.

b) “witches” were not usually seen as single pratictioners, but as groups of tens of pratictioners, a sort of satanist church.

c) (also known from other books) the notion of the old lady who hexes people is older than the witch-hunts, but during the high middle ages the Church assas dogma that witches had no powers (though Satan could persuade them that they had). Thus witch killing was a civil occupation not supported by the Church. In this stage there were (civil) witch trials, but no widespread witch huts. Later Catholic dogma (and, I suppose, Protestant doctrine) changed, and the witch was seen to have real powers – but at that point we are speaking of the idea of groups of witches, not of the old lady with hexes.

From this, it seems to me that witch-hunts were a projection of the wars between Catholics and Protestants, and that witchcraft was seen as a sort of “satanist heresy”.
It seems also to me that the wars between Catholics and Protestants were a lot about self perception, group affiliation, and the perception of “justice” (since the state at the time was quite theocratic, obviously for the Cathoclics but IMHO implicitly also for the Protestants).

I think that the idea that moral, state, and church are three different things is quite recent, and that the “normal” state of things is a sort of theocracy, so that religion, moral and law are quite the same thing.
So when we are speaking of religion in the modern sense, we are speaking of a rather different beast than “religion” in general, and that the modern private form of religion is a very frail act of balance, so that we have often returns of the older religion-whith-positive-law (fundamentalism) or a derive to atheism.

Just a note:
I have met two “saints” – people of whom you could not conceive doing a bad thing – as wholly good as a cat is wholly a cat. Their state of grace was immediately obvious, and impossible not to respond to. Both were religious (on a Buddhist, the other a Hindu). Whatever had enabled them to reach this state, it was not just a subjective, inner experience – it radiated to those around them. But I would not seek to explain it “rationally”; that would be like explaining one’s response to a piece of music.

‘mostly in those part of Europe where there was a patchwork of Protestants and Catholics. Spain, for example, was fully Catholic, and had no witch-hunt.’ (Random Lurker, 351)
IIRC the Spanish Inquisition found (after one unfortunate outbreak in Basque country) that if you allowed torture, anonymous denunciations and denunciations by the already accused witches, you got a runaway witch-hunt. So they disallowed all of those in cases of alleged witchcraft in order to focus on real enemies like heretics, Jews and Muslims. They were rational professionals.
A patchwork equals a weak government that could not enforce its favourite religion. A strong government could both suppress heresy and control its population, no matter how hysterical they got.

Nor does one have to believe all other social clubs are wrong wrong wrong to be part of one.

Nor does one have to believe that all other religions are wrong wrong wrong to be a Christian. Some Christians do, admittedly, but I wouldn’t blame the religion – some members of non-religious social clubs (political parties, football clubs etc) have fairly strong views about members of other social clubs.

does Spufford say anywhere in his book that he believes the existence of an all mighty, all powerful etc God, as roughly outlined in the Bible

I don’t know, not having read it, but he does say

“I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions.”

Emphasis added. Which sounds to me as if religion for Spufford is primarily about the community and the sense of the numinous, and secondarily about truth-claims. See also my comment #83 and this long post which I know I’ve linked to several times already, but which I really do recommend to anyone still reading this thread, as it goes into all this stuff at some length, with added jokes and musical interludes and contemporary art and astrophysics.

Omega Centauri @329
At last a comment I can relate to! Yes your on the right track.

On this tack, then of course the problems arise when people forget that it is a game, and that they can choose to stop playing. Somehow, that seems strangely reminiscent of the theme of a lot of modern movies.

Spufford’s God is by definition unknowable. A “meddling sky-fairy” as he puts it, an interventionist god who answers prayers, smites enemies and blesses stuff would not be this unknowable entity in which he has faith.

Which is odd, since someone with Spufford’s ideas in Palestine around the year 30 CE would not have been able to accept the Jesus of the New Testament as his saviour and become a Christian.

Phil,
maybe it’s just me, but I can’t get around the concept of “trying to believe”. That is not reconciliable with what “believe” means for me. It is much more common that I have to make an effort not to believe something (because the evidence is against it, no matter how much sense it makes intuitively). If on the other other hand, the evidence if “for” something, that I don’t particularly feel comfortable with, I don’t try to believe, I tend to keep a jaundiced eye on it, regarding it as tentatively “the best explaination we have at the moment”. I can’t ever really remember being able to believe something by trying.

Man Kay @ 330 is interesting. Spufford, it seems, has written a very personal statement (taking what the OP and others have said, I have only read the intro). Is the complaint about missing the point that he ought to be allowed to express his individual opinions without, as it were, bringing down the wrath of God? That might be ironic.

W/r/t witchcraft, I’ve read things that suggest it was seen to be associated with local customs that were disliked by (as it were) centralizing forces. E.g. midwifery versus “medicine.” That might be interesting. Not something foreign, exactly, something people were likely to be familiar with themselves.

JW Mason 297 “I suppose I should be included in the “others” here. With due respect, I disagree. I think those of us taking the Durkheim-Weber-Marx-William James view of religion do have essentially the same conception of that Spufford does. Which I would summarize as: (1) Our existence as moral and social beings poses real, profound and unavoidable questions, which cannot be answered in terms of material reality and by science; (2) religion is a valid attempt to answer those questions, as opposed to an invalid attempt to answer questions about the material world (to the extent it seems to be the latter, it’s because metaphorical language has been misinterpreted, or because the religion has degenerated into superstition); and (3) religion is not only or mainly a set of propositions, but practices, collective identity, and feelings or experiences.”

I haven’t thought about it in those words, but I think I agree with you. But if people need religion, then the question is what religion should that be? This is were Christians and their defenders really annoy me. Sure it is easy to poke holes in the arguments of naive rationalists, but the validity of those criticisms do not justify the jump to “Jesus Christ is our Lord and savior”. As a post enlightenment society we are in the position to make this decision for ourselves. To me the answer is obviously a sort of critical atheism that combines in a deep faith in the importance of truth with a strong belief in the moral value of other human beings.

JJ @368
Worship? – the worst system of government – apart from all the others?

I think it is a pretty thin analogy.

It’s generally taken as a warning sign when a culture’s intellectuals start privileging what they feel instead of what they think.

Would anyone defending the “emotions first, beliefs third” approach to life care to apply a similar analysis to libertarian with a visceral emotive disgust for state regulation leveraging that into the factual claim that global warming is a hoax? After all, global warming would obviously require international cooperation between governments to solve, and since that would be bad, it follows that it cannot possibly be true. And the notion that scientists might fabricate data is infinitely more plausible than the notion that a virgin-born corpse can return to life.

See also: Pascal’s Wager.

Even C.S. Lewis, when he wrote his version of the Day of Judgement in the Last Battle, has some believers in the Calormene death-god Tash end up being saved on the grounds that they would have believed in Aslan if they’d had the chance – and his theology wasn’t exactly liberal.

Those people aren’t damned–but they are wrong. Aslan can excuse them only because their failures were caused by their religion, not by their individual will. If you won’t blame the religion–in this case, the death-god Tash–then you must blame each of the followers.

Aslan can excuse them only because their failures were caused by their religion, not by their individual will.

I don’t really see the problem. Either way the upshot is that Aslan judges some of them – and not others – to have been good enough to be saved, which must mean that “worships Aslan” isn’t a necessary condition of “good enough to be saved”.

In any case, the “sea of faith”/”many paths to God” mentality is very widespread among your actual believers.

JW Mason: “What I don’t believe is that people were more irrational in 1600 and are less irrational today.”

Of course, you are free to define rational/irrational as a constant, if you like, but, then, you have to construct some other set of terms to describe what has changed. And, in describing what has changed, you may, indeed, wish to be scrupulous about skirting notions of “progress”.

I was trying to draw attention to the ways in which Western cultures have changed, in ways that prevent people from giving the same credence to religious propositions, as “beliefs”, that people often did, in eras prior to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. I think that there’s abundant evidence that people today are far more “rational” than they generally were in 1600. Some kind of tipping point was reached in the late 17th and early 18th century, which amounted to almost a phase-change, and, yet, it is apparent that in individual propensities to believe or to reason in rational/irrational ways, it was only a relatively small and statistically irregular shift, at best, and an inflection point on a centuries-long process of relentless rationalization of institutions, which encompassed medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, Gutenberg, the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reform, the Scientific Revolution, Hobbes and the English Civil War, the Industrial Revolution(s), the French Revolution, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Nietzche, Weber’s (or Chandler’s) political bureaucracy running on fossil fuel, . . . . If, after all those centuries of rationalizing, we were not more rational, in some important senses, it would be curious, indeed.

It’s certainly not my wish to exaggerate the extent to which all that rationalizing has actually improved human behavior or welfare, any more than I would want to make exaggerated claims for the success of Christianity in its parallel and competing project to improve human ethics, though I think it fair to say that the Enlightenment did cause the Christians to step up their game, considerably, even as it made their game more difficult to play.

The hysteria over the McMartin Preschool molestation case probably does give us some sense of how crazy things can get. It’s easy to use Freudian concepts to project back into the 17th century a rationalized explanation for events with a thin documentary record; not so easy for more recent events. Civilization remains a thin veneer on an East African Plains Ape, which has had only a few millenia of trying to live amid massive groups of strangers.

No one with an interest in economics, can fail to note the de-generation of policy economics into scholasticism and worse, credentialing a priesthood to preside over pious calls for the sacrifice of millions, amid deep-voiced assurances that austerity will call forth the confidence fairy, assurances so incredible that they would embarass a cargo cult or the Temple of Baal. Stupid remains the loyal servant of the stubborn self-interest and corrupt irresponsibility of the powerful, despite all the efforts to circumscribe both power and stupid with rationalized institutions.

It’s only a problem if your refrain is “don’t blame the religion”.

My refrain is “don’t dismiss religion as a force for good in some people’s lives, and don’t dismiss all religious believers as deluded, stupid, or reactionary”. Horrible things have been done & defended in the name of religion. (That’s also true of Marxism, and I’m still a Marxist.)

More than that, the point about Spufford’s book is that it’s an invitation to expand your understanding of something even if you don’t agree with it

Coming late to a long thread, but doesn’t this contain the extremely condescending assumption that if you disagree with Spufford’s beliefs it *must* be because you don’t understand them?

ISTM that what Spufford calls “taking religion seriously” is what Dennett called “belief in belief” — the idea that nonbelievers must abase themselves and declare that there must be something wrong with them since they don’t believe, and aspire to believing in something (that they don’t have good evidence for — obviously those things don’t count), and then they can become more complete human beings.

Thanks, but no thanks. How I experience the numinous is none of Spufford’s goddamn business, but I reserve the right to not take it at face value, AND to think less of people who do, because there are awfully good reasons to distrust the idea of taking numinous experiences at face value.

For example: many different people believe many different things on the basis of tradition and/or intuition. Many of those beliefs are incompatible; therefore many of them are wrong (even if we don’t necessarily know which ones). Therefore, tradition and/or intuition are unreliable indicators of truth, and any belief with no support outside those areas doesn’t really deserve to be taken seriously until it comes up with one.

P.S. Historical note: what started the New Atheism and distinguishes it from the Old has nothing to do with YECs or neocons; it was founded by an essay by Dawkins that appeared in the Guardian on September 12, 2001. Somehow I doubt it was a mystic vision that inspired Dawkins to reexamine the previously common (among atheists) belief that religion was a harmless indulgence of human foolishness, and specifically, drop the “harmless” part. Not because Dawkins is incapable of having mystic visions, or even because I expect that if he did he would take them with large grains of salt, but because then-current events provide a much more convincing cause.

@phil #374

I call them like I see them. And what I see in Spufford’s writing is an encomium to a textbook description of the psychological dynamics of denialism — evolution, global warming, 9/11, you name it. I object in the most strenuous possible terms to any double standard that demands I “respect” the intellectual inegrity of one process but not the other.

“I tend to think that the religious version of this process is generally benign, particularly if entered on as an adult, but not invariably so by any means.”

I’m not even particularly inclined to dispute that in most people, most of the time, most of their fruity religious beliefs are benign or even emotionally healthy.

But modus tollens is, last I checked, still a valid argument form. We (and by “we” I mean Western secular liberals generally) should have a real, open, honest conversation about the place of a/para/non-rational activity in human affairs. But the very first thing about honesty is a respect for truth. Unless I missed it, none of the 300+ replies have come forward to defend the truth of a virgin-born corpse returning to life. So I take it as read that Spufford believes something that is not true. What’s dismaying to “militant atheists” like myself is the apparent willful indifference of belief-in-beliefers to what should be the single most obvious fact in the discussion. From there, the modus tollens practically completes itself.

We can and should argue about when, where, and how aggressively we should direct our energy against irrationalism in the public sphere. Does it really matter if my neighbor doesn’t believe birds are descended from dinosaurs, or that a cracker becomes human flesh? Let’s talk about it! But first let’s agree that birds are descended from dinosaurs, and crackers don’t become human flesh.

Regarding the view of religion as “Practices, then maybe community, then maybe supernatural doctrine”, I’m reminded of the much-maligned Alain de Botton, who proposes to keep the first two and skip the last entirely; I have sympathy with his goals, if not his specific ideas to achieve those goals. I envy the church-goers their baptisms, confirmations, bar mitzvahs, etc.: atheists should mark major life events, in addition to weddings and deaths, in a communal way. (Which is not to say we could not, and for all I know some do, but it doesn’t come naturally, it seems.) I think for many people membership in the community of faith actually comes first as a motivation for religious practice and belief. I think that before atheism can become the commonplace thing it ought to be, there will need to be replacements for filling these human needs. However, I cannot regard the current system of filling these needs by giving at least lip-service to a particular set of falsehoods as more than a historical accident.

Regarding the “emotional sense” of Christianity, I have to say that much of it eludes me, and this is setting aside the truth claims, and accepting for argument’s sake Spufford’s “God of the Metaphorical Mush”. That is, I don’t quite understand what makes some aspects of Christian belief emotionally attractive. Besides the emotional incoherence of an all-knowing, all-powerful god who created us to suffer so much, in what way does it make emotional sense that Jesus “died for our sins”? What kind of god whose opinion I could respect would regard such a scheme of self-abuse as significant? What sensible god would command a sort of ritual cannabilism (or maybe theophagy)? In what way is “because God says so” an emotionally satisfying reason to be a good person? I don’t get it.

The part of Unapologetic that I found myself calling The Gospel of Francis is about as compelling a modern retelling of the core Christian story as I’ve ever read, and I’d urge everyone to read it who wants to know why Jesus is still a big deal regardless of everything else we know (or think we know.)

Full disclaimer: I’m not a Christian, I’m an atheist, but Spufford’s version of the story is mine as well. That, and A. Lincoln’s second inaugural address, are why I once described myself to an outraged fundamentalist, who was beating up on me for my quotes from the New Testament, as an atheist d’expression Chrétienne.

So we should stop denigrating the immateriality of souls because they’re material?

I’m not sure that parses.

Kiwanda:
I think for many people membership in the community of faith actually comes first as a motivation for religious practice and belief. I think that before atheism can become the commonplace thing it ought to be, there will need to be replacements for filling these human needs. However, I cannot regard the current system of filling these needs by giving at least lip-service to a particular set of falsehoods as more than a historical accident.

Personally I think that’s fair enough. As I said in that post I keep linking to, if I ever get religion it’ll almost certainly be one religion in particular, i.e. the one I grew up in. Having been brought up an Anglican, it would take years for me to commit properly to Catholicism and decades to become a Buddhist, and I haven’t really got that kind of time. That’s not to say that Anglicanism is the best way – or even a particularly good way – to have religious experiences in company with others, just that it’s there.

I don’t quite understand what makes some aspects of Christian belief emotionally attractive. Besides the emotional incoherence of an all-knowing, all-powerful god who created us to suffer so much, in what way does it make emotional sense that Jesus “died for our sins”?

Reminds me a bit of Father Dougal admitting his doubts:

Father Dougal: Well, you know the way God made us all, right? And he’s looking down at us from heaven and everything? And then his son came down and saved everyone and all that? And when we die we’re all going to go to heaven?
Bishop Facks: Yes. What about it?
Father Dougal: Well, that’s the bit I have trouble with.

There are lots of aspects of Xtian belief, even the more ‘mythical’ parts, that I find very resonant – the idea of God becoming a human being, dying and rising again is an incredibly powerful image (and not only a Xtian one), and I do think that anyone who looks at it, says “Bronze Age folk tale” and moves on is missing out. But the whole “He died for our sins” bit – I could never believe that even when I was a Christian.

But I can’t agree with this:

Some of the discussion here defends what religion could be, with beliefs that are inconsequential, metaphorical mush, and ignores what (Christian) religion more commonly is, an acceptance of certain claims as boldface “truth”.

Firstly, as I said in my previous comment, general physical truths – those fossils actually are relics of Noah’s Flood – are in no way core to Christianity; lots of Christians reject them totally. Reading the Bible literally is a very modern idea. Christ’s Resurrection isn’t really a “boldface truth” – everyone who believes it literally happened also believes it was a unique exception to the boldface truths of death and decomposition. Secondly, holding those two contradictory beliefs together leads directly into what you denigrate as “metaphorical mush”, which is much more common – much more normal – among Christians than you seem to think. If you were to ask a Christian (sympathetically) what they really think happened on Easter Sunday or on the road to Emmaus, I think you’d get a ‘metaphorical’ answer as often as not.

Of course, if you ask for boldface truths and to hell with the metaphor – yes, yes, never mind “in a kind of a way”, never mind “they had a real experience of something”, did he come back to life or didn’t he? – boldface truths are what you’re going to get. All the more so if your starting question was “are Christians so stupid or ignorant as to believe that a three-day-old corpse can come back to life?” I think this is what’s distinctive about the New Atheists, if anything is – they don’t understand religion because they don’t want to.

chris @383
Thanks for your very eloquent contribution.

Not only do I agree with every sentiment exactly – I am really envious of with how well you expressed it.

Phil @ #392Faith which wasn’t accompanied by the possibility of doubt wouldn’t be faith, it’d be (subjectively) certain knowledge

Meanwhile, scientists will say (if pressed) that certain knowledge is also subject to doubt; that even things we routinely call knowledge are subject to doubt and challenge in the light of new evidence or theories.

I’m unfamiliar with his writings beyond the excerpted chapter. Can anyone confirm or deny whether he believes it is literally true that a corpse can be reanimated after three days; and if so, whether he is explicit about whether things like “emotional assurance that there is a mercy” function as epistemic support which can and does outweigh the evidence accumulated by the medical community to the effect that corpses cannot be so reanimated; and if so, what general criteria or methodology he recommends we adopt to distinguish which empirical claims we are or are not entitled to dismiss when they conflict with such emotional experiences?

Even agnostic/atheist Biblical scholars would point out the resurrection stories of the Gospels don’t point to a “reanimated corpse.” There is no resurrected Jesus in the shorter ending to Mark, and in Luke he appears on the road to Emmaus but they don’t recognize him, then Jesus vanishes at the table the moment they do. Doubting Thomas touches the wounds of the risen Jesus, but he appears in a locked room and then vanishes from it.

I know to a strictly positivistic mind (and really, can we abandon a completely shredded and disproven philosophy by now?) this isn’t helping, but the fact is there is no Gospel account of a reanimated corpse. Some believers might even think it happened, but it’s not what is recorded in the scriptures.

As many Biblical scholars point out (not all of them religious believers at all), the gospels indicate something happened, some experience occurred, to some people. Which is perfectly in line with Spufford’s thesis, at least as I gather it from this post.

rmj
Using trust instead of faith makes it worse. We should trust a probably non-existant being? Or a probably false set of ideas? Making a leap of faith about such things seems more reasonable to me.

“But those things are real, and they are borne by religion.”
1. I dispute they are real (they might FEEL real – which is something else).
2. Maybe they aren’t “borne” by religion, just “exploited” by religion.

The idea that there are many ways to God is very widely held among religious believers

This is simply swimming in mushy soup now. Unless we’re the realms of quantum divinity, with Christ stuck in a box and us calculating the probability of the God particle decaying, then Jesus is either the son of God, or another prophet (but not the most recent), or just a Jewish heretic with some nifty moral philosophy to sell us. There is no way for all three of those things to be simultaneously true.

Now, I can see that a believer might think that believers of other things or non-believers are not necessarily going to hell simply for that, but this “many ways to God” thing is trying to have your mushy cake and eat it.

Using trust instead of faith makes it worse. We should trust a probably non-existant being? Or a probably false set of ideas? Making a leap of faith about such things seems more reasonable to me.

A) “Leap of faith” is a crap notion. Not even valid in the original (Kierkegaard), at least as it is usually understood. Nor, for that matter, as S.K.’s pseudonym used it. Let’s leave it aside and stick more closely to William James’ conclusion:

The freedom to ‘ believe what we will ‘ you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, ” Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true.” I can only repeat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider.

b) don’t get me started on the question of “existence” unless you are willing to prove your own. For all I know, in this context, you’re just a Turing test. (No, seriously). Kierkegaard covered that rather handily, too.

It is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists–worse still, for the brave souls who venture to do it, the difficulty is of such a kind that fame by no means awaits those who are preoccupied with it. The whole process of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of investigation exists. Therefore in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who indeed does exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated.

Probably a false set of ideas? So we’re back to positivism or empiricism. As Hume left us, we can discuss two categories of statements: analytic, and synthetic. The former state the obvious, the latter state what cannot be proven empirically (“This flower is beautiful.”) So we can’t really say anything, and we’re back to proving nothing about anything.

Unless we’re going to establish a criteria for falsity that doesn’t run into Godel’s problem of incompleteness, and which would require appeal to another formal system to answer (which formal system itself is incomplete).

In the end, trust is all you’ve got, if you want to get anywhere at all; or at least think you have.

Now yet another term in need of explanation, “the sacred”, has been introduced as an explanans.

William, I have no problem with the idea of metaphor, at all. But there are certain foundational beliefs that simply cannot be taken as metaphor. Things like the existence of God. And, if you’re Christian, that Jesus Christ was the son of God. I’d call that a bare minimum, wouldn’t you? Otherwise you’re an atheist who goes to church.

reason: We trust people because they have shown they are trustworthy, if they haven’t then somewhere along the line we will stop trusting them. Or do you really believe not only that “love IS blind” but that it SHOULD be.

No, I believe that my trust in my partner is a commitment that I’ve made, which makes demands of me as well as of her. If my partner lets me down, I ask myself if I’ve misinterpreted something or if I’m expecting too much. Then I ask her. Then we talk some more. If my bank lets me down I change banks. The word ‘trust’ is doing two completely different jobs here.

Katherine: this “many ways to God” thing is trying to have your mushy cake and eat it.

May I apologise on behalf of Christians everywhere for being insufficiently consistent to live up to the exacting standards of Christian belief set by, um, atheists.

“Many ways to God” isn’t some kind of “wouldn’t it be nice if things were nice” rationalisation – it’s what lots of people believe. Lots of devoutly religious people, who sincerely believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God – but who don’t find it necessary to believe that God would have damned most of humanity for worshipping somebody other than Jesus, and therefore leave open the possibility that God might have revealed himself in other ways to other people.

Atheists on this thread seem to be asking whether it’s possible to be a Christian and have both a heart and a brain; when we answer Yes, they say Ah, but we’re talking about being a rigorously consistent Christian. Newsflash – there’s no such thing. Apart from anything else, rigorously consistent with what? There are two separate Creation stories, only one of which features Adam’s rib (the other has one of my all-time favourite lines from the Bible, “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them”). The Gospels tell three versions of one set of stories and one radically different set of stories; you can’t believe them all, they can’t all have happened. And so on. Biblical literalists and self-styled fundamentalists patched up and smoothed over the gaps in the text, and imported a lot of highly contemporary assumptions which aren’t actually there – see rmj’s comment #399 for a rather glaring example. But the Bible, and a fortiori Christianity, isn’t about the-book-is-on-the-table statements of fact.

A Big Explanation that supposes an omnipotent Deity who not only hides but who intends to torture people for eternity for not figuring out and hewing to his private plans seems to me to be as grimly comic as determinism, madness, and pain.

I was thinking about that on my blog the other day. (Inflatable Stonehenge included.)

Katherine: this “many ways to God” thing is trying to have your mushy cake and eat it…. Lots of devoutly religious people, who sincerely believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God – but who don’t find it necessary to believe that God would have damned most of humanity for worshipping somebody other than Jesus, and therefore leave open the possibility that God might have revealed himself in other ways to other people.

And by the way Phil, I note that you missed out the first half of my sentence, which was “I can see that a believer might think that believers of other things or non-believers are not necessarily going to hell simply for that”

If you sincerely believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, then by definition people who don’t believe this are, in fact, wrong, whatever their other attributes. There’s no getting around it. I’m not quite sure why there is a need to deny this inevitable fact.

Katherine, I find it hard to imagine Spufford condemning anyone as a heretic or an unbeliever:

“My metaphorical description of my feelings about unknowable stuff doesn’t seem to line up word for word with your metaphorical description of your feelings about unknowable stuff! Infidel!”

Katherine, I find it hard to imagine Spufford condemning anyone as a heretic or an unbeliever

He’s got another guy to leave that to.

Wasn’t there something in some book somewhere about washing hands?

Up until 325 AD, half of the Christians didn’t think Jesus was divine; to them, he was just a great rabbi. “A” son of God, not “the” son of God–as if you might say, “we are all sons and daughters of God.” This led to much blood in the streets, bishops’ thugs bashing each other over their opposing beliefs, until the Roman emperor Constantine, a convert, called the Council of Nicaea to decide things once and for all, and put an end to the strife, and that council decided that Jesus was god (thus the Nicene Creed). It was a POLITICAL decision. Arius’ writings were destroyed, so we don’t know what the non-trinitarians believed, in detail. The story is nicely told in a charming book that anyone will enjoy, When Jesus Became God, by Richard E. Rubenstein.

Which doesn’t even have the strength of its own convictions enough for anyone to say “yes, I believe in God, I believe Jesus was the son of God and that you are wrong.”

So you can’t stand religious people because they’re all deluded and bigoted, but what you really can’t stand is those religious people who aren’t deluded and bigoted, because that’s what religious people should be like…

There are plenty of devout Christians, firm believers in the divinity of Christ, who nevertheless believe that not everyone who doesn’t believe in the divinity of Christ is damned. I can back this up, as well. God is omniscient, we’re not. God sees who he’s admitting to Heaven, we don’t. We can know that we’re saved, which gives us good reason to convert people if we can. However, we can’t know that everyone who misses out on the Good News is damned, or that there’s no other way for God to make himself known to them.

This is perfectly good Christian theology – as well as being a belief held more or less articulately by lots and lots of Christians – and it seems to me that it’s a substantial improvement on believing that everyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus is damned. That belief is a massive stumbling-block for anyone who believes in an omnipotent and benevolent God; in my experience it’s only embraced willingly by people who want God all to themselves and haven’t really got the point of the Gospels at all.

it remains true that large numbers of people, some of them important, do make truth claims about the state of the world based on their ancient poetry, and try to make life tougher for the rest of us on the authority of these claims. They need to be fought, and if the blowback from that fight upsets the nice club members who don’t actually cause problems for others, I’m genuinely sorry

Those people need to be fought with the “nice club members” on your side. If you’re fighting the NCMs as well, you’re fighting the wrong enemy.

“Unless, of course we believe that we really are masters of our own destiny, in which case, maybe we ought to start acting like it.”

Didn’t I come in here. @153 @159

P.S. In case people get the wrong idea my argument is perhaps on another level than may have been clear. I’m mainly arguing that I think the content of the religion is far more important to adherents than he is admitting. In fact, I find his view of what people like Spufford may see in religion a bit insulting. I guess they think more deeply about it than that. Maybe I’m wrong.

rmj @407
I’m sorry I guess you misunderstand. I’m not defending a leap of faith, I’m condemning blind trust.

Reason, my apologies. I concede your prior art, but would like to point out in my defense that I really wasn’t seeking a patent on the idea.

Phil
“All the more so if your starting question was “are Christians so stupid or ignorant as to believe that a three-day-old corpse can come back to life?” I think this is what’s distinctive about the New Atheists, if anything is – they don’t understand religion because they don’t want to.”

This suggests to me that you don’t read much of the New Atheists at all, because that particular story is one of the more believable ones (not the way it is presented, but plenty of people who were believed dead revived). The bit that really gets them going is the contradictory nature of the relationship of the “creater” and the world (does he interfere or doesn’t he – and why is he so obsessed with sex), and the entire anthropocentrism of the story. Intelligent apes in an unimportant remote corner of the universe think the universe was created just for them, sort of thing.

Instead of simply assuming that ‘many’ Christians treat their religious beliefs as “mushy”, or true, or whatever, we could at some point look at research on the topic.

There, one might find that, for example, nearly 50% of white evangelical Protestants regard their faith is the one true faith and nearly 50% of evangelical Christians believe there is only one correct way to interpret the Christian faith. These results are cited in the paper “Reasoning About Beliefs” discussed in the blog post on religious beliefs as facts, ideologies, or preferences I linked to above.

link: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~larisa/Heiphetz_Spelke_Harris_Banaji_JESP.pdf

I presume there is more research out there about how people conceive of their own religious preferences. This might be more useful than anecdata.

GiT@391:
” So we should stop denigrating the immateriality of souls because they’re material?

I’m not sure that parses.”

No, we should stop denigrating the immateriality of souls because they represent the temporal presence of people whose work represents the aggregate temporal and material production of our civilization.

Geez, GiT, gimme a break.

I’m just trying to establish the proposition that the industrial ideology of material salvation is isomorphic to the agricultural ideology of spiritual salvation.

If you’re fighting the doctrine that Christ was born of the Virgin Mary… er, why, exactly?

Because people who believe stuff like that can also believe that Pat Robertson cures their cancer by reading their postcard on TV and then die as a result, and fewer suckers are better. “Then fight faith-healing” isn’t really a good enough answer if you’re gonna ignore X miracles – including the spell of prayer – for the sake of sensitivity.

If you’re fighting the doctrine that Christ was born of the Virgin Mary… er, why, exactly?

That’s a matter I leave to believers to sort out. Trouble is, when someone wants to do something, and says in justification that God wrote a holy book that commands it, your suggestion amounts to unilateral disarmament. We can’t say — however politely — no, if there is a God, which there isn’t, he didn’t write your holy book; what else have you got. Perhaps we could learn enough about the doctrines of his particular sect or sub-sect to try to convince him that he’s wrong by his own lights, but that’s a mug’s game — and what if, by his own lights, he isn’t wrong? As, in all likelihood, he isn’t?

.

when someone wants to do something, and says in justification that God wrote a holy book that commands it, your suggestion amounts to unilateral disarmament

I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about now, and I suspect you haven’t got anything specific in mind. Restrictions on abortion? Discrimination against gays? Lots of Christians oppose both. As for televangelists, there’s a reason people like Oral Roberts found their own churches.

Campaign against what you want to campaign against, and I can pretty much guarantee that some Christians will be campaigning alongside you. Campaign against Christianity, and not only do you lose those potential allies, you get bogged down in side-arguments with people like me.

Which is exactly what happens when atheists conclude that the material resources of the world are effectively infinite, and require only the conquest and conversion of the people who possess them to reproduce the operation of an industrial society.

Just as the theists once concluded that the spiritual resources of the world (other people and the work they represented) were equally infinite, and required only their conquest and conversion to reproduce the operation of an agricultural society.

I see we are now over 400+ posts and no one is willing defend the actual truth of any of the Credal claims Spufford chides nooatheists on for their lack of sophistication.

JW Mason @386 concedes, if only indirectly, that there was no historical event in Roman Palestine accurately described as a corpse returning to life, leaving us to wonder what percentage of believers would accept a description of their faith as only being “true” (scare quotes) in the sense that The Berenstein Bears or The Cat in the Hat teach our children important “truths” (in scare quotes). But this is not, as far as I can tell, Spufford’s view.

And forgive me, but I cannot even understand how Phil’s reply @382 even takes the form of a marshalling of evidence and inference tending to increase the probability of a resurrected corpse. Only talk of “grappling” with the idea of a resurrected corpse, or “making sense of” the idea of a resurrected corpse, concluded with a naked contradiction to the effect that some things might be both impossible and yet still possible. (One wonders, why the need to argue the impossible is possible when only a few paragraphs earlier I’m told that (true?) believers don’t really believe the alleged possible-impossible event was even actual!)

A thinner-skinned interneter would find the further assertion @393 that I not only “don’t understand” religion, but that my ignorance is deliberate and willful, to be insulting in light of the nearly two decades I spent as both a born again christian and later a confirmed catholic — but honestly I just find it funny. Not as funny as the implication that it never occurred to any Christians whether it was literally true that a man was raised form the dead, or to any number of animists whether witches can literally ruin one’s sexual potency through curses and spells, until “unsophisticated” nooatheists came along and asked them. A sort of Schrodinger’s Cat theory of literalism.

It is not true that regressive tax cuts for millionaires always pay for themselves. It is not true that urban heat islands account for the data of global warming. It is not true that WMDs were found in Iraq. And yet for some reason, I am never accused of “hamfisted positivism” for pointing any of these things out.

Look, if some liberal intellectual wants to go to church and say “it’s all a metaphor”, I have no problem. But first he has to agree, clearly and explicitly, that it’s all a metaphor. If he is going to obfuscate and equivocate about what he really believes, then I reserve the right to call him out on his obscurantism.

People wonder why anyone would have a problem with admittedly benign silly beliefs like virgin births whose connection to harmful behavior is more attenuated than those pertaining to the virgins one allegedly gets in paradise for murdering people in office buildings. Here it is: I think people should try to believe true things and disbelieve false things. That is my secret agenda. And the thing about special pleading — even when the silly beliefs are benign or even helpful — is that you can’t meta-special meta-plead for why special pleading is really OK in just this one case.

Campaign against what you want to campaign against, and I can pretty much guarantee that some Christians will be campaigning alongside you. Campaign against Christianity, and not only do you lose those potential allies, you get bogged down in side-arguments with people like me.

We’re going around in circles. Of course Christians will not join in an attack on Christianity — something I am not the least bit interested in doing. But when someone wants to impose on me and claims some authority that, for what seems to me to be good reasons, is not an authority at all, is it really your advice that I not dispute whether what he claims is a holy book dictated by some deity is, in fact a holy book dictated by some deity? Must I restrict myself to arguing with him over the proper understanding of his own religion — rather arrogant thing for a non-communicant to do, I should think, and probably futile because the guy is probably right about what his own religion commands. Should I so handicap myself just to avoid offending nice, largely blameless people who are, nevertheless, very likely to become discombobulated simply upon learning that someone who seemed like such a nice person actually disbelieves in holy books and deities?
Large numbers of us unbelievers have no interest in converting believers as long as they leave us to our own particular delusions. Sometimes, however, the question comes up. Usually because some believer brings it up, either explicitly or by trying to use my tax money to impose upon the rest of us, or by reacting in horror at the very thought of unbelief, wondering why unbelievers aren’t axe-murderers and rapists.
Two true stories from my own life, since some folks prefer anecdotes to arguments. First, I never doubted the existence of God until somebody with a serious background in theology and philosophy said he could prove it. He tried, he failed — and he caused me to look at a variety of arguments and evidence, none of which made much sense. Second, the question rarely comes up in real life. I was married 17 years when my wife said she didn’t know any atheists. She was startled when she learned that she knew at least two, including her husband. I don’t go out of my way to take on believers. I attend religious services for events that are significant to people I care about, even though most of them know I do not share their creeds. I have a lively interest in the customs and beliefs of various religions; one of my dog-park friends is a free-lance rabbi and we often have stimulating, friendly discussions about Judaism. It doesn’t matter to him that, interesting as I find the subject, I no more believe in the non-metaphorical truth of his stories about Yahweh and the ancient Hebrews than I believe in the non-metaphorical truth of Homer’s epics. If everyone were reasonable like that, we could all get along. But not everybody is, and if a large group of people gets upset at the very idea of non-believers, and resents them for that fact itself, apart from whether they are nice and polite or arrogant jerks — ask yourself if someone even suspected of being an atheist, however blemish-free his or her character and manners, could be elected President of the United States — what is to be done?

http://www.chiesadicefalu.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/2.jpg

if a large group of people gets upset at the very idea of non-believers, and resents them for that fact itself, apart from whether they are nice and polite or arrogant jerks — ask yourself if someone even suspected of being an atheist, however blemish-free his or her character and manners, could be elected President of the United States — what is to be done?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, campaign against intolerance of atheism. You know what? Tons of Christians will be on your side.

john c. halasz at #449 writes: But proofs or disproofs of God’s existence are probably the least interesting aspect of the matter, since no one’s belief or unbelief is actually based on such secondary elaborations.

I used to believe; now I don’t, and it is precisely because of evidence, arguments and proofs about God’s existence. Back when I used to believe, my belief was also based on evidence, and was logical (as far as I could tell) although it turned out to be unsound on close examination. Lots of atheists are in the same position: used to believe, and now don’t, based on what you call secondary elaborations.

It does appear to be the case that no ones religious belief is based on evidence, proofs or logical arguments (apart from naive examples like my own pre-teen beliefs), and that the spectacular cathedrals of spoofery constructed by people like Spufford to defend their beliefs are built on some foundational belief held for other reasons.

I think there is a simple explanation for this asymmetry, but then, I would, wouldn’t I?

As to why we should address the existence of God instead of just opposing obnoxious behaviour by believers (and hoping to enlist less obnoxious believers on our side), there is the problem of authority. Mushy CofE types like Spufford aren’t likely to try and use the authority of their God on us (Spufford even sneers at the New Atheists for thinking the CofE is oppressing them), but there are other, larger and more combative branches of Christianity.

The catholic Bishop of Down and Connor is in the news in Ireland today, condemning the opening of a Marie Stopes private clinic in Belfast which will provide (legal) abortion service. In his statement, he doesn’t try to make any logical arguments we could address, he just states that abortion is against the teaching of the Catholic Church.

In his statement, he doesn’t try to make any logical arguments we could address, he just states that abortion is against the teaching of the Catholic Church.

So we say, off the top of my head, “There is nothing in his statement to suggest that closing this clinic would result in better outcomes for women; women desperate to terminate a pregnancy will always find a way, and the closure of this clinic would simply help to drive abortion services back underground. I may not be qualified to argue Catholic doctrine with the Bishop, but I know something about the realities of women’s lives, and I am quite certain that more women – and more children – will suffer avoidable pain and misery if this clinic is closed than if it is left open.”

Or you could say, “Women have a right to abortion services on demand, and no old man in a silly hat is going to tell us otherwise just because some old book tells him so.”

Which do you think would go over better to a largely Catholic audience?

It’s all about picking your fights, and picking your enemies.

Phil writes (of Katherine): And it seems to me that you were stating that for anyone who believed in salvation through faith in Jesus Christ it was, or should be seen as, logically necessary that anyone who didn’t have that faith was damned.

Hmm, that’s not how I read Katherine. I thought she was saying that if you believe Jesus is the son of God, then you believe all the religious folks who believe otherwise are wrong, not that they are necessarily damned. Wrong about an issue of fact.

Shorter version – what Niall said.

I think the CofE uses the Apostle’s creed, right? If so one of the assertions Spufford tries to mean every Sunday is: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

So some Christians do believe in bodily resurrections, and other Christians see it as just an inspiring metaphor, and I’m not really interested in trying to identify which of those are the “real” Christians.

Fair enough. I’ve never believed (or even, when I was a Christian, tried very hard to believe) in the bodily resurrection at the end of days, so it wasn’t even in my mind when I wrote that comment. I don’t think it materially changes my argument, though – the point is that Christians believe (along with everyone else) that when somebody dies here and now they aren’t going to come back three days later, however hard you pray (and indeed that anyone who did pray for a loved one to come back wouldn’t deserve respect for the depth of their faith, they’d deserve professional help).

Katherine – leaving salvation out of it, it’s entirely possible to believe that Jesus was the son of God, and at the same time to believe that the beliefs held by other people (although they appear to be mistaken) may in reality be just as good (in the sense of making it possible to live just as saintly a life, leading to just as many hungry people being fed, or whatever your metric for ‘good’ may be). There may be more things in heaven and earth than we’ve dreamt of. Come to that, if God’s omniscient and we’re not, presumably he knows things we don’t.

Phil writes: whatever your metric for ‘good’ may be

What if your metric for ‘good’ is ‘true’?

Lots of Christians do believe horrible and hateful things. Somebody once told me that Mother Teresa would be eternally damned unless she converted to the right form of Christianity before she died, the form of Christianity that had got her out into the slums of Calcutta not being the right one. On one level that’s angels on the head of a pin – what happens after anyone dies has never really interested me* – but it could have real effects; anyone who thought having the right beliefs was that important would presumably prioritise funding missionaries over funding famine relief.

So a kind of bigoted narrowness does, for many people, go along with belief in Christianity (go, as they say, figure). But here’s the thing: if bigotry always goes with religious belief and seldom appears without it, then religion’s your enemy. If bigotry sometimes goes with religious belief and sometimes with other beliefs, then bigotry’s your enemy – and un-bigoted religious believers are among your allies.

*In and of itself, that is, as I don’t believe that anything does. I do think what people believe about salvation and damnation is interesting & often very revealing.

Niall (also Katherine) – believe me when I say that some of the most devout Christians I’ve known, some of the people most deeply and passionately committed to their faith, would be deeply, deeply reluctant to answer that question with either a Yes or a No. I think the people I’m thinking of wouldn’t want to go any further than “mistaken”, or preferably “apparently mistaken”. This has nothing to do with being woolly or uncommitted. Christians know what they believe to be true, but to say that other beliefs are false you’d need to know the mind of God.

There’s no room for mind-of-god waffle here: if the Jews or the Moslems are right about Jesus, there is no Mind-of-the-Christian-God, because Jesus-the-god, one third of the trinity, doesn’t exist and never did.

Christians know what they believe to be true, but to say that other beliefs are false you’d need to know the mind of God.

So we are back at quantum divinity, where there is a third state between “true” and “false”.

We don’t have any business asserting that our beliefs (“Jesus was the son of God”, etc) are factually correct. We have no way of knowing whether they are factually correct or not; we’ll only know for sure when we meet God, by which time it’ll be too late to argue. So we stick to “incorrect as far as we can see from our imperfect vantage point”. Which is not a “mushy”, “woolly” or “uncommitted” position, although it does have a certain humility.

You’re assuming that you, as an outsider (and someone who was raised in one small corner of one version of Christianity) can speak for all Christians.

No, I believe that I can speak for some Christians – and reasonable numbers of ordinary Christians, not just “a couple of hundred liberal theologians” or whatever the phrase was. To disprove that “all X are Y” you don’t need to show that all X are not-Y.

Katherine – the third state between “we know it’s true” and “we know it’s false” is “we don’t know for sure”.

Katherine – the third state between “we know it’s true” and “we know it’s false” is “we don’t know for sure”.

Except it’s not “know” is it? It’s “believe”.

So we are back at quantum divinity, where there is a third state between “true” and “false”.

Katherine, I probably think much as you do myself, which is to say that if this religion business is all metaphor, what’s the point of all the very specific demands on our (or at least their) credibility that its adherents make? This is why I’m an atheist despite the obvious appeal of the stories religions tell about the divine and the human and what governs the relationship between the two. Still, they do have a point, and as I’ve said, it isn’t a mushy one. It points to something fundamental that you’re overlooking here, in your attempt to trap Spufford in a logical cul-de-sac.

Look at your statement above. If you consider the insistence on such a principle to be evidence of lousy logic, then presumably you don’t believe in electrons either. The problem here, as most believers realize, and you seem not to, is that what’s at issue isn’t the mind of God, it’s the mind of Man. We came up with electrons based on a very simple model, which at the time we thought represented an observable and experimentally demonstrable description of something we’d discovered by legitimate means. Then, through improved measuring equipment, and more exact observations, we began to encounter some very odd occasions when this model failed to explain what we’d thought it had explained. Suddenly we had something best described as a wavicle</i, I suppose and the word electron became a metaphor, which five minutes before we discovered its somewhat disturbing non-particle property had presumably been nothing of the kind. Very like the evolution of religion, I would say, yet, in all modesty, still nowhere near capable of replacing it. So castigate Christians if you will, for all sorts of reasons, but really, you should stop already with the mushy, and the fluffy. It makes you sound as though you’re wearing a pince-nez.

Katherine – no, that’s precisely the point. It’s “we believe, but we don’t know“.

Any Christian believes that God sees more and knows more than any human being, including him- or herself. All statements about God are approximations; prayer is an orientation to something unknowable, something outside ourselves. So the truth of a statement like “Jesus is the son of God” is, more or less by definition, one element of a greater truth that we don’t and, as human beings, can’t fully comprehend. For all we know, someone could go through life denying the divinity of Jesus and yet picking up more bits of that truth than a staunch Christian. If that’s a possibility, what sense would it make to say that they were wrong to say Jesus wasn’t the son of God?

Christians believe they understand a bit of God’s nature and they believe they’re genuinely oriented towards it, but they don’t know.

(Islam is much better at dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s in this respect – There is no god but Allah and Mohamed is his prophet. That’s that, job done.)

This has been a long and diverse thread, and it’s gone way beyond the quite modest point of my original post, so I think it’s time to draw things to a close now. Thanks everyone.